Baruch She’amar 3: From Heaven
The Mishna Berurah says that before reciting Pesukei D’zimrah, you should say Baruch She’amar. The Men of the Great Assembly decreed this great praise. Those include Mordechai, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, Zechariah, Chaggai, and Malachi. Do these people sound familiar? They are the ones who instituted that we say Baruch She’amar. But they didn’t write it. The Mishna Berurah writes that “a piece of metal fell down from heaven and they found the Baruch She’amar prayer engraved on it. The prayer had 87 words. The mnemonic of this is a verse that says, ‘His (God’s) head is spun gold.’” (Song of Songs 5:11) the Gematria of ‘spun gold,’ the word paz is 87.
This is a strange Halacha. It is part of Halacha, right? That it came from heaven, and one has to remember the number 87, and the verse associated with it, etc. Let’s figure out why. The Rebbi of Ramban wrote the following. “The world was created with ten statements. And the world was crated through ten statements. There was no effort or anything else. Therefore, you start with ‘Blessed is the One who spoke, and the world came into being.’” In saying these words, you’re tying speech together with the fact that the world came into being through speech. Count how many times ‘blessed’ is written after that verse. There are ten. How many paragraphs are there in Pesukei D’zimrah? Ten. The ten correspond to the Ten Statements with which God created the world.