Jewish Baron Gives Queen Elizabeth a Brilliant Hesped in Parliament

 

Queen Elizabeth has been eulogized by countless politicians and other leading figures across the globe. But in his tribute to the late monarch in the House of Lords, Baron David Wolfson used a new method of talking about the significance of her death: explaining a pillar of Jewish mysticism.

In a six-minute speech on Friday, Wolfson, a Conservative who served as a justice minister under Boris Johnson, walked his peers through several aspects of Jewish tradition — including gematria, the Jewish practice of finding meaning through the numerical value of words.