A number of years ago, an agnostic sensing that he had chanced upon the idea to make a fortune, wrote a book about Biblical Codes. He tried to show that the Torah contained secrets that could unlock the future. He then pointed to codes that affirmed almost all that is modern and happened to the Jewish people and to the world in the last century. His results were uncanny, but repeatable. While such a practice would be near impossible in English, doing gematria is a simple exegesis in Hebrew. What that man did was not holy and was not supernatural. He did not discover Torah Codes at all. What he did was a game and was without question a scam on the Jewish people.
There are, however, Biblical codes. You do not have to be a mathematician to read them. Anyone who reads the Torah can find them. They are themes that go through the stories and affect you and me. For example, in the Torah portion we read this week, emphasis is placed upon Isaac's role as a peacemaker. Peacemaking is a Biblical theme, a Biblical code. We in like manner should always strive to make this a more peaceful world. Remember the rabbis said that there is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except that in the latter world there will be no tyranny.
A second code is truthfulness. The Torah is honest about our losses in war and about our victories in war. The Torah does not fade away because we have been sinful. Indeed Torah demands a high standard of truthfulness from ourselves at all time. Torah is not a book about human victories, but one about human life.
A third code demands that we do not flee this world because of all the evil found in it. We do not flee this world because goodness is such a hard thing to recreate. Think of the difficult lives that Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob (about whom we have not yet read) lead. We are not to seek God in the absence of people, but in the midst of people. Every story aims to that truth, to that code.
In truth the story does not end there because stories themselves are the codes. We are expected to read them to go over them, to make them part of our existence, and to recognize that those stories are Jewish Biblical Codes. They are not abstract or mathematical. They are very simple, human, and they make for a better world.