The Breath of All Life, a paraliturgical Nishmat Kol Ḥai for Shabbat morning by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

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Rachel Barenblat

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21 June 2013 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

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Psuqei d'Zimrah/Zemirot l'Shabbat ul'Yom Tov

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interconnectedness, interbreathing, 21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., English poetry, Prayers as poems, English vernacular prayer, paraliturgical nishmat kol ḥai, נשמת כל חי Nishmat kol ḥai, Breath

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Contribute a translation	English
	Breath of our bodies and harmattan of our ambitions
	hurricane of our angers and chinook of our forgiveness
	tempest of our childbirths and cold front of our silences
	articulated gasp of pain and muffled sigh of pleasure
	inbreath of my housecat and outbreath of every tree
	gust that reshapes coastlines and tempest of our hearts
	wind of the physical world and the realms of emanation beyond
	Breath of All Life, the breath of all life blesses Your name.
	If every mouth joined right now in breathing Your praises
	if every present thing on earth stopped so we could laud You
	if we all shared the roaring voice of lion and elephant and walrus,
	the heightened senses of the mystic and the hunting owl
	if we could fly like the Concorde looping your smoky name across the sky
	if we could discard differences: human, animal, fire, stone, seed, snow
	even that cry of togetherness would not be enough to thank You.

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“The Breath of All Life, a paraliturgical Nishmat Kol Ḥai for Shabbat morning by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Rachel Barenblat

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat (a/k/a Velveteen Rabbi) serves Congregation Beth Israel in North Adams, MA. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is author of five volumes of poetry, among them 70 faces: Torah poems (Phoenicia, 2011) and Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda, 2018). A leader in Jewish Renewal (former co-chair of ALEPH, now a senior builder at Bayit: Your Jewish Home) she resides in western Massachusetts. She has blogged as the Velveteen Rabbi since 2003.

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." –Psalms 90:17