The name Mafalda in Hebrew letters is מפלדה. Below: how its number adds up, which page of the Torah it falls on and what verse stands there. Everything is computed, nothing is guessed.
מפלדה
In short
Your name in Hebrew letters is מפלדה. Mafalda is a name of Germanic origin, from “maht + hild”, which means “might + battle”. It is a Portuguese and Italian form of Matilda; Mafalda of Savoy was the first queen of Portugal. In Hebrew it is written by sound. Adding up the numbers of its letters gives 159 — the same as the Torah word קטן, “small”. That number points to Torah page 159 of 354 — in the portion Vayakhel. What that portion is about: The Sabbath comes before the work on the Sanctuary; the people bring more than enough; Bezalel and the craftsmen build the Tabernacle. The verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with the last is Genesis 7:8. Each of these steps is laid out below with its sources. Every figure can be checked by hand.
You wrote “Mafalda” — this exact spelling is what was calculated: מפלדה. A name from the Tanakh — its Tanakh spelling is used. If your name is spelled differently, correct the Hebrew spelling and the report is recomputed.
Adding up the letters of the name מפלדה gives 159.
159
The number 159 is the Torah word קטן — «small» (Genesis 1:16).
And he made for it two golden rings under the crown thereof, upon the two ribs thereof, upon the two sides of it, for holders for staves wherewith to bear it.
This is from the portion Vayakhel. What it is about: The Sabbath comes before the work on the Sanctuary; the people bring more than enough; Bezalel and the craftsmen build the Tabernacle.
Other ways of counting
The tradition counts the same name in several ways. The main one is above: each letter is its number. The other eight are old and checkable too; each gives its own number, and many of them have a Torah word with the same number.
Final letters as 500–900 (mispar gadol) — 159. A Torah word with the same number is קטן — “small” (Genesis 1:16).
Reduced, each letter to one digit (mispar katan) — 24. A Torah word with the same number is חוי — “Hivite” (Genesis 10:17).
Ordinal: alef 1, bet 2 … tav 22 (mispar siduri) — 51. A Torah word with the same number is אכל — “to eat” (Genesis 2:16).
Cumulative: a letter plus all letters before it (mispar kidmi) — 680. A Torah word with the same number is פתר — “to interpret” (Genesis 40:8).
Squares of the letter values (mispar perati) — 8941.
Building: the sum grows with each letter (mispar bone’eh) — 623. A Torah word with the same number is יגרתי — “I dreaded” (Deuteronomy 9:19).
The letters that come out are יוכקצ — not a word that stands in the Pentateuch. Atbash: letters mirrored, alef for tav, bet for shin, and the number of the resulting word — 226. A Torah word with the same number is צפון — “north” (Genesis 13:14).
Filling: the names of the letters are counted — alef, bet, gimel… (milui) — 675. A Torah word with the same number is הסירת — “the pots” (Exodus 38:3).
The number 159 appears in the classical books 18 times across 2 works. The earliest mention is שער הפסוקים (~1573).
Every letter of the name explained, the words and namesakes with references, the Hebrew date, the letter and tribe of the month, day 861 of your life (±1), the psalm by age, the attestations from the classical books — a PDF sent to your email.
The number of the day, every morning
Every date has a number too. Once a year it will match the number of your name — 159. The channel posts one number a day, one verse and the Torah page it lands on. Nothing after it, no mailing list.
Hebrew is written from right to left. מפלדה has 5 letters: מ Mem, פ Pe, ל Lamed, ד Dalet, ה He. The first letter is Mem, the last is He.
For an engraving, a sign or a tattoo, show the spelling to someone who reads Hebrew: transliterating a name is a choice, not the only option.
The name מפלדה does not stand as a word in the Pentateuch — as with most names, including many Tanakh names from the later books.
The verse of your name
There is a custom: at the end of the prayer one says a Torah verse that begins with the first letter of one's name and ends with its last. For מפלדה these are מ and ה. The Pentateuch has 16 such verses. The first of them is Genesis 7:8:
מן הבהמה הטהורה ומן הבהמה אשר איננה טהרה ומן העוף וכל אשר רמש על האדמה
This is from the portion Noach. What it is about: The flood and the ark; the rainbow as a sign of the covenant; the tower of Babel; ten generations from Noah to Abraham.
The name מפלדה has no such day. The numbers of the dates in a year cover 326 values out of 940, and 159 is not among them. Half of all names are like this — neither good nor bad, just a fact of counting.
Add a date of birth and the verse of meeting from that week's portion is added to the reading.
Each Hebrew letter has a number; a word's number is their sum (alef 1 … tav 400). The page is the remainder modulo 354: the Torah divided into 354 pages of 861 letters, as the lunar year has 354 days. Everything can be checked by hand.
