hebrew, the movie Pi

Yesterday I rented the movie Pi, it's an independent film about a
genius/insane number theorist.  There were some Jewish people in it who
were trying to find a pattern in the Torah, and they said that each
Hebrew letter was assigned a number, and that sometimes the words made
equations, like this:

the letters in father (or man, I don't remember) add up to   3
+ the letters in mother (or woman) add up to                41
= the letters in child add up to                            44

(3+41=44)

Is this true?  I think that's pretty cool, and it would be some
undertaking to come up with a conlang like that, where a whole bunch of
sentences made equations like that, or maybe that the number each word
added up to represented some underlying meaning (or syntactic
function).  I seem to recall a conversation about a woman who thought
each word in Tibetan stood for something else other than its really
meaning (maybe not Tibetan, but something like that).  Maybe instead of
having gender, you could have odd/even number agreement.  Hmm...maybe
that'll come up in my next conlang.

Nicole