May Hashem Answer You

Where the verse sits

Moshe is speaking to the people at the end of the forty years in the desert. Just before this verse, he reminds them of Baal Peor, where many Israelites served an idol and died in a plague (Bamidbar 25). Then he turns to the ones who stayed loyal:

A baraita (a teaching from the time of the Mishnah) in the Gemara sets this verse beside a phrase from the Baal Peor story itself, "the ones who attached themselves to Baal Peor" (Bamidbar 25:5):

Rashi explains that a bracelet slides back and forth on the arm; it is not really attached. The people who stayed with Hashem were truly attached. (Just before the baraita, the Gemara brings another teaching that reads the two pictures the other way around.)

Where you hear it in shul

Many Jews know this verse from shul. In Ashkenazi siddurim, and in Nusach Sefard (the prayer rite most Chassidim use), when the Torah is taken out and the first person is called up, the gabbai (the person who runs the Torah reading) says "Blessed is He who gave the Torah to His people Israel in His holiness," and the whole congregation answers with this verse. The Rema (Rabbi Moshe Isserles, Krakow, 1500s, whose notes on the Shulchan Aruch give the Ashkenazi practice) records the first line:

The Arukh HaShulchan (Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein, Lithuania, 1800s) puts the verse right after that line:

Not every siddur has it: the Edot HaMizrach (Sephardi) siddur on Sefaria does not print the verse at this point. Check your own siddur. Where it is said, the sheet's "before the Torah reading" may point to the moment when the whole shul already says this verse. That reading is ours; the sheet does not say it. The sheet adds two things: the husband says it, and he says it with joy. The Torah is read in shul at least on Shabbat, Monday and Thursday mornings, a practice the Rambam traces back to Moshe:

What does it mean to cling to Hashem?

The Gemara asks the obvious question about this very verse. Rabbi Elazar and his teacher Rabbi Yochanan are discussing people who never learned Torah, and whether they will live again at the end of days. Rabbi Elazar says:

The Gemara in Sotah asks the same question about a different verse, "Walk after Hashem your God" (Devarim 13:5), and answers with a different kind of closeness:

The Gemara goes on: Hashem visited the sick, comforted mourners and buried the dead, and so should you. The Rambam turns the Ketubot answer into a mitzvah:

In these sources, clinging to Hashem is something you do with your life. You stay close to people who teach Torah, and you act the way Hashem acts.

"Alive, all of you, today"

The verse ends with three words: alive (chayim), all of you (kulchem), today (hayom). In Ketubot, Rabbi Elazar uses "alive" for coming back to life at the end of days. The sheet does not explain why it chose this verse. A plain reading, which is ours and not the sheet's: a family waiting for a new life hears "alive, all of you" as a prayer that everyone, mother and baby, will be well.

What the psalm says

Read plainly, it is a prayer for a king going out to war. The Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, Provence, around 1200) says it was sung for David when he went out to battle. The people pray that Hashem will answer him "on the day of trouble," accept his offerings and give him what his heart wants. Then comes its best-known line:

Rashi (the classic commentator on Tanach and the Talmud, France, 1000s) reads it differently. In his reading, David does not go out at all:

Rashi's picture is of someone who stays behind in Jerusalem and prays for the ones who go into the battle. Rashi adds, in the name of the Sages: "Were it not for David, Yoav would not have made war." That may be part of why families turn to this psalm while a mother is in labor. That last thought is ours, not Rashi's.

Every weekday morning

In the weekday Shacharit, Tehillim 20 comes after Ashrei and before Uva LeTzion. The Abudarham (Rabbi David Abudarham, Spain, 1300s) explains why it comes after the Amidah, the standing prayer of eighteen blessings. He cites Midrash Tehillim, which counts Tehillim 1 and 2 as one psalm. Counted that way, eighteen psalms come before Tehillim 20, like the eighteen blessings:

On some days the psalm is left out. The Rema lists them. (Tachanun is the prayer of pleading said after the Amidah on most weekdays.)

The Mishnah Berurah (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, the Chafetz Chaim, 1838-1933) adds the 14th and 15th of the first Adar in a leap year, and a house of mourning (131:35). For Erev Yom Kippur, the Chayei Adam (Rabbi Avraham Danzig, Vilna, early 1800s) gives a reason that comes from the psalm's own words:

Sephardi practice is different. The Kaf HaChaim (Rabbi Yaakov Chaim Sofer, Jerusalem, early 1900s) reports that Sephardim leave it out on every day that Tachanun is not said, and that each community should keep its own custom (Orach Chayim 131:37). Check your own siddur.

Seventy words

The sheet does not say why seventy. But there is a seventy tied to this psalm: its words. We counted the words of Tehillim 20 in the Hebrew text on Sefaria (Miqra al pi ha-Masorah). With the heading, "For the conductor, a psalm of David," and counting words joined by a maqaf (the Hebrew hyphen) one by one, the psalm has 70 words. Without the heading it has 67. If each hyphen-joined pair counts as one word, it has 62 with the heading and 59 without. Tap "Number the words" in the counter below to check our count.

The tie comes from a teaching in the Zohar (the central book of kabbalah). In its section on Pinchas, Rabbi Abba describes a hind, a female deer, that he calls "the hind of the dawn" (ayelet hashachar, the name in the heading of Tehillim 22). When her time comes to give birth:

The Zohar goes on: Hashem hears her and sends a serpent whose bite opens the way, as in the Gemara below, and she gives birth. In the Zohar the hind also stands for something larger. A few lines earlier it says that the pains of exile come to her, like a woman in labor. The Zohar says "the number of the words." It does not say how it counts them.

The Zohar's picture is close to one in the Gemara. There, Rabbah reads one of Iyov's (Job's) complaints as a play on words: perhaps Hashem mixed up Iyov with oyev, "enemy." Hashem's answer, as the Gemara reads it, lists examples of His exact care. One is the hind giving birth (Iyov 39:1):

The Gemara's point is how exact Hashem's care is: the help comes at exactly the right moment.

Twelve times

The sheet's "twelve times" also appears in an earlier book. The Chida (Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai, 1724-1806, born in Jerusalem) wrote a booklet of prayers called Sansan LeYair. For a woman in labor, he writes:

The twelve are tied to a kabbalistic intention that we do not go into here. The Chida's booklet does not mention seventy. We have not found either number in a book by the Rashash, though we could not search all his writings.

Moshe and Pharaoh

The first verse is Moshe speaking to Pharaoh, after he has warned him of the last plague, the death of the firstborn:

The sheet stops there. The verse goes on: "from Pharaoh, in burning anger." In the words the sheet quotes, the root "go out" comes three times: tzei (go out), etzei (I will go out), vayetzei (and he went out). The sheet's closing words are the first of these, said three times:

Rashi points out that Moshe was polite to the king. In the end it was Pharaoh himself who came:

A nation born from a nation

Is the Exodus like a birth? A Midrash comes close. Moshe asks whether any god ever came "to take for himself a nation from the midst of a nation":

The sheet does not say why it uses Moshe's words, but older books tie this verse to a hard labor. Rabbeinu Bachya (Rabbi Bachya ben Asher, Spain, about 1300) writes that Israel was freed from Egypt by a power from above, and so this verse is known for a woman having a hard labor:

The "Name" is a kabbalistic reading of the verse's letters, which we do not go into here. Much later, the Ta'amei HaMinhagim (Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Sperling, Lvov, 1890s) gives this verse as a segulah for a hard labor, to be said to her, and explains it with this same Midrash: Hashem brought Israel out of Egypt like a baby drawn out of its mother's womb (Ta'amei HaMinhagim, Segulot 9:1).

Edom on the day Jerusalem fell

The second verse is from Tehillim 137, the psalm that begins:

Its setting is the exile in Babylon after the First Temple was destroyed. Verse 7 asks Hashem to remember what Edom said on that day:

Rashi explains the word aru, "tear it down," as לְשׁוֹן חֻרְבָּן, "a word of destruction," used for something pulled up by its roots. The sheet does not explain why this verse is said at a birth, and we did not find a source that does. We are not going to guess.

"Only then, and not before"

The sheet underlines these words. It gives no reason, and we will not invent one. What it does tell us is that these verses are meant for the birth itself, and not for any time before it. It also says to whisper them, and whispering verses has a history in halacha. That is the next section.

The word סְגֻלָּה is in the Torah. At Sinai, Hashem says that if the people keep His covenant, they will be His treasure:

Today the word is used for practices like the ones on this sheet. The sources draw lines around them.

And the Chida's prayer for a woman in labor, said after Tehillim 20, asks for mercy in the merit of the mothers: