Nuts to you!

Some Jews have a tradition that on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) and usually for the 10 Days of Repentance until Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) they don't consume nuts.Now, nuts don't usually make up a large part of my diet so this wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that my mum's honey cake (truly amongst the world's best) contains walnuts.
Given that honey generally and thus honeycake are traditional this time of year (symbolic of a sweet New Year) this ban on nuts has caused a little consternation, particularly in recent years.

So the question ought to be asked where this nut ban derives from. The answer, we're told, is the result of equivalence between nuts with sin, in terms of gematria.

Clearly for many the concept of gematria will require a brief investigation. In short it's the process whereby each Hebrew letter is allocated a number based on its position in the alphabet (or, rather, the aleph-bet).
The first letter, aleph (א), is 1. The tenth, yud (י), is 10 then increasing by tens to the 20th letter, kuf (ק), which is 100 and then finishing with tav (ת) on 400. These numerical values are used by Jewish mystics to assist in interpretation of hidden meanings behind words, amongst other uses.
Back to the question of the nut ban, we're told that nuts and sin find themselves equally valued in terms of their gematria scores.

My brother, a bit of a scholar with too much time on his hands, decided to test this out and sat down with a pen and paper calculating scores for any of the many terms for sin and comparing them to the relatively few words for nuts.He came up blank, unable to find this apparent equality that should disqualify us from eating this Rosh Hashanah dessert delight.So I decided that this year I'd ask the Rabbi at synagogue how it worked. Of course I forgot to ask, so instead looked it up on google (google knows all!)

The first relevant response to my sercah terms got me to JewishSF.com, which claimed what I'd heard previously - that אגוז (egoz, nut) and חטא (khet, sin) are equally valued. When I worked it out, I came to the same conclusion as my brother - that the results were in fact not equal, but rather differ by 1. Working was as follows:(אגוז א(1) ג(3) ו(6) ז (7in total, adds to 17.(חטא ח(8) ט(9) א(1in total, adds to 18.
Now, admittedly it's a while since my university maths courses but i'm pretty sure that 17 isn't the same as 18.

Investigating a little further, I found myself at the ohr sameach wesbite (ohr.edu, ohr sameach meaning "new light" in Hebrew. And no, I won't spell it "someach") which informed me that it works, as long as you spell khet wrongly, excluding the final letter, aleph, with a gematria value of one. To me this sounds a little bit dodgy and i'm not sure how such a tradition (and a deleterious one at that!) got started based on such shaky mathmatics, not to mention spelling.

So there you go, Myth Busters, we've got one debunked here. I won't be advertising this silly nut ban (perhaps named after those who promote it, rather than what you're not allowed to eat?!) and certainly don't plan to stop ingesting that most delicious of honey cakes any time soon.

Wishing all a happy & sweet New Year, and to be signed & sealed in the Book of Life.