I sat at the kitchen table and slowly told my father everything that had taken place in Reb Saunders’s synagogue. He sipped his tea and listened quietly. I saw him grimace when I began to go over the gematriyot. My father did not particularly care for gematriya. He had once referred to it as nonsense numerology and had said that anything could be proved that way, all that had to be done was to shift letters around adroitly so as to make the values come out any way you wanted.
