‘How to Say Tehillim: A Gentle Beginner”s Guide’

By Aaron Mandel

You open the book, and your eyes fall on the first line, and something in you closes. You have wanted to know how to say Tehillim for a long time — perhaps for years. A friend reads a chapter each morning; the women in the front row of shul seem to know exactly which page to turn to. But you sit with the book in your lap and the words feel like they belong to someone else. To David. To holier women. Not to you. So the book closes, and the wanting stays. If that is where you are standing, this is written for you, and it begins exactly where you are: at the beginning, freezing at the first page, which is the most ordinary place in the world to start.

Let me say the thing you are afraid is true, and then take it apart. The words are someone else’s first. That is not a flaw in you. It is the design. Tehillim — the Book of Psalms — was sung long before you were born and will be sung long after. You are not being asked to invent prayer out of nothing. You are being handed words already worn smooth by ten thousand mouths and invited, gently, to add yours.

How to Say Tehillim When You Have Never Done It Before

Here is the first thing, and it is permission, not instruction: you do not need Hebrew, you do not need to understand every line, and you do not need to feel anything in particular. You need a book and one quiet minute. To learn how to say Tehillim is simply to open to a chapter and read it — aloud if you can, in a whisper if that is all you have, in English if the Hebrew is still a wall. The understanding comes later, and slowly, the way a face becomes familiar.

It helps to know what you are actually holding. There is a saying the tradition treasures — that the Book of Psalms “contains the whole music of the heart of man, swept by the hand of his Maker.” (A Book of Jewish Thoughts (Hertz)) Every weather of the soul is already written somewhere inside it: fear, longing, gratitude, the flat grey of an ordinary Tuesday. When you say a psalm, you are not performing a feeling you do not have. You are finding the page that already knows you.

And the book is more crowded than it looks. Tradition holds that David did not write alone — that “in the Book of Psalms David included those which were composed by ten elders: Adam, Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses,” and the singers of the Temple. (Hebraic Literature (Talmud/Midrash/Kabbala)) So the voice you are borrowing is not one man’s private diary. It is a chorus reaching back to the first human being. When the words feel like everyone’s but yours — that is exactly right. They are everyone’s. That is what leaves room for you in them.

Why These Words Are Worth the Awkward Beginning

It is fair to ask why you should push through the strangeness at all. The tradition answers plainly. David himself weighed these words against everything we usually chase and found them heavier: “I prefer the teaching You proclaimed to thousands of pieces of gold and silver.” (Pirkei Avot 6:9)

There is an old story that says the same thing as a parable. A man once cried out in the marketplace, “Who wants to buy the elixir of life?” The crowd pressed in — and he opened the Book of Psalms and read to them: “Who is the man that desireth life and loveth days, that he may see good therein?” (Orchot Tzadikim 25:26) That is what you are reaching for when you reach for Tehillim. Not a duty. The elixir, bought a little at a time.

And what is the elixir, finally? The clearest answer in the whole tradition may be David’s own. “But as for me, closeness to God is my good,” he says, “one thing I asked from God; that I seek, that I may dwell in God’s house all the days of my life, to gaze on the pleasantness of God.” (Mesillat Yesharim 1:5) That is the whole purpose, said in one breath. Not fluency. Not coverage. Nearness. You say the words in order to come close, and you are close the moment you begin, however clumsily.

Three Concrete Ways to Begin — Choose One, Let the Others Wait

You do not need a system worthy of a woman who has done this for forty years. You need a single small door. Here are three. Pick one, and let the other two wait their turn.

A kapitel a day. This is the gentlest entry. You say one kapitel — one chapter — each day, beginning at Psalm 1, and you let the book carry you forward a single page at a time. Some mornings the chapter is four lines and you are finished before your tea cools. Some mornings it is long. It does not matter; you are not racing. Begin at the very first words, which are themselves a blessing on beginning: “Fortunate is the man that walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.” (Mesillat Yesharim 5:26) One kapitel a day is you, quietly, buying that elixir in the smallest affordable amount.

One psalm you return to. The second way is not about coverage. It is choosing a single psalm and making it yours — saying it every day until it stops being recitation and becomes something closer to breathing. Let it be a psalm that names a hunger you already feel, the way David named his: “As a deer yearns longingly for the water brooks, so does my soul yearn longingly to You, O God.” (Mesillat Yesharim 7:21) You do not have to manufacture that thirst. You only have to say the words that already hold it.

A line you carry through the day. The third way is the smallest of all, and it suits a life with no quiet hour in it. You take one verse — a single line — and carry it. You say it on the train, at the sink, in the pause before you answer a hard message. The Psalms themselves recommend exactly this kind of dwelling: “Whoso is wise, let him observe these things, and let them consider the mercies of the LORD.” (Psalms 107:43) To consider is slow work. It is not finishing a chapter. It is staying with a few words long enough for them to stay with you.

When the Words Still Feel Like Someone Else’s

Here is what no one tells you at the start: the borrowed words become yours not by understanding them but by repeating them. The first week, a psalm is a stranger’s coat. By the fortieth time, the sleeves have taken the shape of your arms. One morning a line you have said a hundred times without feeling lands in your actual heart, on the exact day you needed it and did not know it. The words did not change. You did, by staying.

So when the strangeness comes — and it will — do not read it as proof that you are doing it wrong, or that this belongs to women holier than you. Read it as the ordinary first chapter of every Tehillim practice that has ever lasted. The front-row women you envy were strangers to these words once, too. They simply kept coming back.

Let the practice be small enough to survive a bad week. Not “I will read the whole book.” Just this: tomorrow morning, before the phone and before the noise, open to one kapitel, say it aloud even in a whisper, and underneath it write a single honest sentence of your own — what the psalm touched, what you are carrying, the name of the one you are saying it for. A small Tehillim journal kept beside the book is how the borrowed words slowly become yours to keep. Begin with one chapter and one true line tomorrow, and you will already have begun.

Published by Higgayon Press. For questions of halacha, consult a qualified rabbi.