Parasha Ha Shavua: Pinchas

The Source of Breath for All Flesh
by Rabbi Jacob Elisha Fine, Director Jconnect Seattle

In 1854, Chief Sealth, or Seattle as he is now known, delivered a speech in Western Washington to his Duwamish tribal assembly. The Duwamish tribe represents the indigenous people of metropolitan Seattle, where they have been living since the end of the last glacial period (c. 8,000 B.C.E., 10,000 years ago). We thankfully have a record of this remarkable speech from the notes of Dr. Henry Smith who was present.

Chief Seattle’s message to his people is addressed to the federal government on receiving news that it sought to purchase the Duwamish land. The speech is a powerful reflection on this desire “to buy” earth, which in Chief Seattle’s eyes cannot be bought and sold, and serves as a scathing condemnation of the white man’s relationship with the natural world.

In contrasting his people’s relationship with the natural world to the earth relationship of the people who seek to buy it, Chief Seattle talks, among other things, about a connection to breath.
The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath—the beast, the tree, the human, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And the wind must also give our children the spirit of life. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow’s flowers.

Chief Seattle and Moses are probably not often likened to one another. But at least in one respect, and probably many others, they are of the same mind. These two leaders, separated by cultures and millennia, seem to share an awareness of a unifying Source of breath which animates all of Creation.

In this week’s parshah, Pinchas, Moses calls out to God by a distinctive name—as אֱלֹהֵי הָרוּחֹת לְכָל בָּשָׂר, the “Source of the breath of all flesh.” Having just been reminded that he will not enter the Promised Land and that the end of his life was near, Moses turns to God in heartfelt request for the Divine appointment of a successor to lead the Israelite people. And at this moment Moses calls out to God by this unusual epithet.

Moses, our tradition’s greatest religious figure and prophet, like Chief Seattle, experienced the tremendous diversity of the created world as ultimately unified. He too knew that “all things share the same breath,” and that the breath that animated him would ultimately be the same breath that animated his children and grandchildren. In invoking God as the Source of all Breath as his own passing looms and as he begins to transfer his leadership to Joshua, Moses reveals an awareness of his breath as being a link in a long chain from the beginning to the end of Creation.

The food that we eat is alive. Like us, it breathes in and out. When we eat, the life force of that substance does not become extinguished but becomes part of us, part of our breath. As we eat our vegetables this week—pulsating with life, let us pay attention to the air that both it and we share. In so doing, we will be fulfilling Chief Seattle’s charge to remember that the “air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.”