The Moshiach Crossword Trick

Rabbi Lazer Brody as Lazer Beams writes about a "moshiach code" going around:

נ	ח	מ	ן
ח	י	ש	מ
מ	ש	י	ח
ן	מ	ח	נ

My esteemed and cherished friend, Rav Yehoshua Sofer the Abir Aluf, showed me the above code that's now circulating all over the place. Any way you read the letters, from right to left, left to right, up to down, or down to up, you get "Nachman" or "Moshiach".

A suppose that the connotation for R' Lazer, a Breslover chassid, is that there is some connection between Rav Nachman of Breslov and mashiach. Perhaps that Rav Nachman is mashiach, or will predict mashiach, or something like that.

Is this compelling? Is it more, or less compelling, than the prediction of Erez Levanon's murder? First, let us fact check. The claim is that

Any way you read the letters, from right to left, left to right, up to down, or down to up, you get "Nachman" or "Moshiach"

Is this truly so? Try reading the first column going down. We get NAMCHAN, which is not NACHMAN. Try the second column going up. We get CHISHAM, which is not MASHIACH. And so on. These are not palindromes, the fact that "Nachman" begins and ends with an N notwithstanding.

What have we here? A simple crossword trick. Take any four letter word or name, and write it around the edges the same way NACHMAN was written above. Then, take the two middle letters of that four letter word and find any four letter word that starts with one middle letter and ends with the other. Write that word in. This is trivial to construct, and you can see many different eerie messages.

Some examples? Sure, I never thought you'd ask. While on the topic of Mashiach, let us prove that the Lubavitcher Rebbe smelled nice. I choose this because it shares many letters with the crossword above:

מ	נ	ח	ם
נ	ח	ו	ח
ח	ו	ח	נ
ם	ח	נ	מ

Whichever way we read this, we get "Menachem," or "Nichoach," savory fragrance.

My wife's name is Racheli. Let us prove that she is part of the Maaseh Merkava, or that she should be an electrician:

ר	ח	ל	י
ח	ש	מ	ל
ל	מ	ש	ח
י	ל	ח	ר

Whichever way you read this, in any direction, it either reads "Racheli" or "Chashmal."

Finally, I've obviously made a mistake somewhere here, because I can construct a crossword puzzle that matches JOSH with OOPS:

H	S	O	J
S	P	O	O
O	O	P	S
J	O	S	H

Whichever way you read it ... well, you know the drill...