The Ezekiel Code

The Ezekiel Code: A Vision of Living Bones is a labour of love, with a certain readership in mind, namely, those who work and play in the field of body/mind/spirituality.

The Ezekiel Code emerged from a long-held question: what is the bridge between Jung’s work on the inner life and Feldenkrais’s work on learning and self-organization? The answer gradually came into view through the contemplation of images and motifs which express themselves in both psyche and soma.

Author and Feldenkrais practitioner David Kaetz (who also wrote Making Connections, about Moshe’s cultural background and its resonances in his work) studied Religion and Near Eastern Languages at Yale. He often teaches together with his wife, who is a Jungian analyst. With every seminar they experience a practical synergy between soul work and somatic education. That these two realms manifest the same living process in different ways is obvious, yet it is hard to speak of their synchrony without stumbling into a terminological hall of mirrors. Another way to approach the question is through the imaginal world (a term used by Henri Corbin and James Hillman), which speaks through both soma and psyche.

The prophet Ezekiel, who was somewhere between the Rudolf Steiner and the Bob Marley of the exile community in Babylon (some 2500 years ago), was entirely at home in the imaginal world. Unpacking just one of his visions, the valley of the dry bones, is the work of this little book.

A review by practitioner Matthew McNatt, posted on the Facebook group “Jewish, Sacred, and Spiritual Resonance in the Feldenkrais Method®”:

I just finished reading David Kaetz’ The Ezekiel Code: A Vision of Living Bones. It’s short and, thus, was easily readable in one sitting — if you don’t count all the times I put the book down to savor, then savor again, what I had just read.

Any synopsis of what David has done in this book wouldn’t do this work justice. I’ll just say that it’s easily among the top 50 books I’ve ever read (and I read a lot). If you haven’t read this work yet, I encourage you to order a copy from David and enjoy the guided exploration that he provides, for yourself.

The Ezekiel Code is a cross between poetry, somatics, religious philosophy, and existential-personalist psychology. David explores Ezekiel’s “Dry Bones” as a Feldenkrais practitioner who is deeply familiar with the Hasidic tradition.

… and that’s about as accurate as my describing Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables as a long novel about a man who stole bread, the limits of justice, and the power of love—or Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities as a story of a drunk man, the French Revolution, and the power and tragedy of love.

Seriously, David has written a masterpiece. I will probably read The Ezekiel Code another three or four times before the end of this year — and I won’t be surprised if I’m re-reading this book every year for the rest of my life.

I came to Feldenkrais Professional training with the two primary intentions — to work through my own tardive dystonia (so I wouldn’t keep facing bouts of not being able to move), and to complete a “personal prerequisite” to graduate school in philosophy (so whatever philosophizing I ended up doing professionally would be grounded in a reality deeper than my own thoughts). While my first intention was realized, by the time I was completing training under Paul and Julie Casson Rubin, I discovered that I had found what I had not intended to find: a life path, a calling, a deeply meaningful interpretive framework — all rolled into one.

To the degree that one can succeed in “capturing spirit,” David has captured the spirit, in The Ezekiel Code, of what continues to draw me so fully into Feldenkrais work, and into writing children’s stories and courses for families built, freely yet for me inescapably, upon the powerful way of learning that is somatic education. There are parts of The Ezekiel Codethat don’t align with my thinking — yet even in these parts, I find myself appreciating David’s writing as an intensely personal, hallowed offering to our community. It’s not my book; I couldn’t have written this one. This is David’s book. All I’m interested in doing here is recommending it… highly.