Making Connections: Hasidic Roots and Resonance in the Teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais [Paperback ed.] 0978401409, 9780978401405

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David Kaetz MAKING CONNECTIONS

Roots & Resonance in the Life and Teachings of

Moshe Feldenkrais Second,Expanded Edition

Making Connections

Roots and Resonance in the Life and Teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais

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Making Connections

Roots and Resonance in the Life and Teachings of Moshe Feldenkrais

David Kaetz

River Centre Publishing Hornby Island , Canada -3-

Copyright© 2007 by David Kaetz All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-9784014-2-9 Second Edition, first printing© July , 2014 Printed in Canada.

For information and orders: www.davidkaetz.com

Feldenkrais ®, Feldenkrais ®Method, Awareness Through Movemen t®, and Functional Integration ® are registered service marks in Canada of the Feldenkrais Guild ™ of orth America.

Cover photos by David Kaetz (Sioux, France). -4-

Acknowledgement

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My thanks to the following (and many others) for their invalua ble help in this project: Ruthy Alon, Carolyn Bateman, Elizabeth Beringer, Donna Blank, Mischu l Brownstone, Russell Delman, Joelle Donnerer, Hana Elter, Jeff Haller, Omri Hason, Amos Hetz, Faith Jones, Deborah Kaetz, Dovid Kaplan, Rabbi Meir Kaplan, Werner Kraus, Amie Lade, June La Pointe, Margo Mcloughlin, Alan Morinis, Michele Ofir, Robbie Ofir, Arielle Silice Palucci, Myriam Pfeffer, the late Mark Reese, Paul Rubin, Roger Russell, Rabbi Nachum Sasonkin, Rabbi Zalman Schachter -Shalomi, Ulla Schlafke, Andrew Schloss, Chava Shelhav, Rabbi Daniel Siegel, Elinor Silverstein, Anna Jacobs Singer, Sid Tafler, Anna TriebelThome, Blandine Wong, Alicia Wilkes, David Zemach-Bersin, Feldenkrais®Educational Foundation of North America (FEFNA), Feldenkra is Guild ™ of North America (FGNA), Feldenkrais Verband Deutschland (FVD), International Feldenkrais Federation (IFF), teachers, students and colleagues of the Feldenkrais Method. And, for a lifetime of passionate inquiry: Dr. Moshe-Pinchas Feldenkrais (1904-1984) ~"t.

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Whosoever reports a thing in the name of him that said it brings deliverance into the world. Pirkei Avot , 6:6 . (Talmud)

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Contents Introduction to the Second Edition I 11 Preface I 13 Prologue I 27

Section One: Roots 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

The Lost World of Ashkenaz I 29 Spiritual and Intellectual Foundations I I 33 Spiritual and Intellectual Foundations II I 37 1648 I 43 The Advent of Hasidism I 45 Pinchas of Koretz I 53 Heatings and Teachings of Pinchas of Koretz I 61 Slavuta I 69 Family of Origin I 75 Geopolitics I 79

Section Two: Reson ance 11

Listening for Connections I 87

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Leaming I 91

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Organization, Awareness, and the Work of Unification

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Further Resonances I 109

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Language I 115

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Moshe Speaks I 125

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A Tale of Two Engineers I 133

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Where Worlds Meet: Th e Soul and the Brain I 139

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Embracing Paradox I 147

I 99

Appendix I: Storytelling as Teaching I 149 Appendix II: A Hasidic Story from Moshe Feldenkrais I 155 Appendix III : Moshe's Ten Commandments

I 159

Appendix IV: A Note on the Spelling & Pronunciation of Hebrew & Yiddish Terms I 161 Bibliography / 163

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Introduction to the Second Edit ion As anyone who knew the man himself will confirm, Moshe Feldenkrais was far from religious, in the common understanding of the term . And yet those who knew him experienced in his presence and his work a great spiritual depth. In the pages that follow we look into what could be described as the spiritua l shadow-Le ., unspoken but nevertheless deeply felt assumptions-of Dr. Feldenkrais ' teachings. A human being has n o straight lines . In us, the closest path between point A and point B is a spiral. A truly human science , and/or a truly human spirituality, would likewise have no straight lines , and thus no rigid boundary between science and spirituality. The desire to eliminate our essential curliness is the essence of self-hatred, and thus the origin of the hatred of others . A science tha t rejects the spiritual is equall y dangerous as a spirituality that rejects science. Moshe Feldenkrais' work is so comprehensive, and has so many sources, that any effort to nail it down is sure to miss the mark. Systemic thinking holds the whole package together; self-defence contributes a motivation and many moves; auto-suggestion informs the inner game-plan ; n euroscience (Feldenkrais was way ahead of the curve on this one) and ph ysics and engineering anchor the work in contemporary research. But none of these things quite touches the purpose of the project which they serve. If there is an intention behind the whole project, it would seem to be the furtherance of human maturity. And since we are composed as much of wonder as we are of reason, maturity belongs as much to spirituality as it does to science. Indeed, we could say that the very nature of maturity has to do with developing an ever more comprehensive view, whereby our tendency to split the world into irreconcilable opposites is replaced by a recognition of interrelatedness. In the Hasidic view, the healing of such divisions is known as tikkun olam, "the repair of the world." The theme of maturity (and the notion that it has something to do with inclusiveness)was there in a letter that Feldenkraiswrote to his mother at the age of sixteen. There we find a line pregnan t with the possibility of paradoxical vision: "I have gone through a lot, and taught myself to see with both eyes." The theme of maturity was there in Feldenkrais' exploration of Coue, it was there in his Judo teaching, and it is there in the FeldenkraisMethod. And here it is in his essay on hearing, published in 1976: In spite of the apparent darkness of the human future, I believe we have not yet reached our Homo sapiens capacities for learning: it is still to early to condemn man on the strength of the small awareness he has acquired by chance and not by his outstandin g ability to reduce great complexity to familiar simplicity-in other words, to learn. We have never yet really used our essential freedom of choice and we have barely learned to learn.1 - 11 -

Leaming has to do with making connections, with bringing together what belongs together. And because it all belongs together, learning is the repair of the world. The repair begins where the brokenness starts: in our own thinking, in our own self-image. Feldenkrais' 1929 essay on Coue (see page 127) quotes a line from a kabbalistic poem, which he would have sung at the Sabbath table with his family every Friday evening through his childhood:

~,o

.it?r:tr;, iT~~C!Y:lf ittf.,'~~

One sense of this line is: the way things manifest is contained in the first thought. What are the optimal circumstances for the kind of learning we are talking about? Moshe's answer to this fundamental question, which he never stopped refining throughout his long and incredibly adventurous life, is what we call the FeldenkraisMethod.

This second edition of MakingConnectionscontains much new material, along with many corrections and emendations. An expanded chapter on language considers the linguistic background of the Method. Dr. Feldenkrais' family history has been updated as new information has come to light. A re-written preface addresses some issues that have been raised in discussions following the publication of the first edition. Thank you for your interest! David Kaetz July, 2014

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Preface Why does it matter for our understanding of the Feldenkrais® Method that its founder came from the partiatlar background that he did? After all, the Method is a way of working in the present with what is present; it does not explicitly deal with history. That said, the present moment is richly informed by past actions. So, as we work with a student, or with ourselves, we are opening a book of living history. Likewise,while the Method itself can be understood on its own terms, the founder and his Method did not appear out of nowhere. Like ourselves and our works, Moshe Feldenkrais stood on many shoulders and his works were woven from many threads. Origins-and our relationship to them-have much to teach us about where we are now. And not only the consdousorigins. In his essay on Coue Feldenkrais writes: We see then that the unconscious mind is a veritable storehouse of memories and knowledge that can become available to us only through diligent observation, study, experience, and much effort.iA

In answering our opening question, it helps to keep in mind that one's background forms a large part of that very storehouse.

Paradoxical Teachings have Paradoxical Roots. Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais was a master of paradox; his legacy is full of paradox, and the profession he created is just rolling in it. From the very first paragraph of Body and Mature Behaviour (1949) he was staking out a new territory that was neither religion nor science, in the common usage of either word: For a long time we believed ourselves to be essentially different from animals. We believed we had souls, that we were created in the image of God, that the world was created for us and revolved around us. With the development of science, however, and especially with the advent of the theory of evolution we swung steadily round looking for any evidence proving that we were merely animals though complex and highly accomplished. Both views are over-simplifications. 18

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Likewise, his teachings are not about the body any more than they are about the mind; rather, they are about the fundamental and functional unity of body and mind. He is proposing a different mode of consciousness, and in that he is in good company. For example, here is the third Zen patriarch, Sengstan: Do not remain in the dualistic state avoid such pursuits carefully. If there is even a trace of this and that , of right and wrong, the mind-essence will be lost in confusion. 2

In front of scientists, Moshe was a scientist's scientist, and it seems he was keen to be recognized as such by his peers. Thus, to many in the profession, the Feldenkrais Method is pure science, and all other considerations are a distraction. And, the y are correct. But the term science does not necessarily expand so far as to embrace the inspiration, the motivation, the intention, the methodology, the personal style and the choice of language of the scientist in question. There is clearly more going on in Moshe's teachings, and manner of teaching, than anything pure science would deign to embrace. Moshe was looking to further human maturity, to encourage adult learning, to empower people to live their dreams, to change their way of seeing and interacting. If it was a science he was teaching, it was a new science, a science of personal evolution, and its territory was so vast as to include the turf of both science and religion, body and mind. Toward the end of his life, to one of his students, Feldenkrais trainer Jeff Haller, Moshe said: "If you think anything I taught you had anything to do with science, you are a crazy f-----g idiot. 113 And so there are those for whom the Feldenkrais Method is a well-differentiated path to freedom and wholeness . And they are also correct . "But wait a moment, rabbi! You said that Shmulik was right, and then you said that Itzik was right, and yet they hold opposite views." "Aha ," said the rabbi. "You are completely right."

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It is tempting and much easier to narrow the picture down, to fall back on something more exclusive, smaller and more defined. The rabbi in this classicJewish joke, however, won't let us do that. A historical/biographical perspective can help make the elusive more obvious . For example, if the mode of consciousness that Moshe taught was a unitary and therefore paradoxical view , then the fact that he was a descendant of teachers of a unitary and paradoxical path could help us to understand how to work with his legacy. The Hasidic view of working with paradox is revealed in the following quote from Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, a great-grandson of the founder of Hasidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov: The paradox twisted into a question is the folly of the void . Because human sense and reason know not how to settl e the issues, th e questions seem profound . In truth there is no settling the se issues at all. 4

In Rabbi Nachman's teachings, as in Zen Buddhism, paradox is not a problem. If we can stay with it long enough, it will take us beyond our habit of sawing the world in two. If we twist it into a question or flatten it into a contradiction, we wind up just where we started, with a split mind. Feldenkrais was raised with Hasidic teachings , and in that tradition it is not a teacher's job to resolve paradoxes for us. It is the teacher's job to set us up to go into the unknown , where learning happens. Trauma matters.

There are many aspects of Moshe's background which have , in ways visible and invisible, informed his work. Among them, his being raised in a dangerous time. The term trauma, as I use it here, refers to events which we have experienced, but which, for reasons of the survival of our sense of self, we are not able to integrate; i.e., we split them off from our conscious picture of the world. In what ways-conscious and unconscious-did the chaos, tragedy , and violence of Moshe's early milieu set the stage for his life and work? Do we take these things seriously in our own thinking about the development of the Method?

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Of course, we have all learned that the method evolved from the martial arts. But Moshe did not become proficient in the martial arts for aesthetic reasons. At the age of two he had had to hide with his family in a sub-sub-basement while a pogrom raged through his hometown. Later, he saw his Talmud-scholar father, armed only with a wooden pole, defend himself, his son and his colleagues against bandits. He lived as an adolescent on the front line of World War One . And, as a teenager, he joined in the defence of his community from murderous riots. As trainer Moti Nativ has made very clear, Moshe's first public teaching involved training his friends to survive knife attacks. Later, unsurprisingly, his teaching addressed the question of anxiety, and the fragmentation of self caused by social and psychological trauma . That we split off the martial arts from the circumstances in which Moshe grew up has something to tell us. From Moshe's school notebook , written , in Hebrew, when he was eleven years old (that is, in 1915, one year into the First World War): The clouds are also dear to me. I sit still and gaze at the clouds. In my imagination there are people, and there are scorpions surrounding them . In addition, I see hell , and much more. And signs, as if they were being revealed to me from the sky. A fiery torch and more. *

One does not have to be a child psychologist to recognize a child under threat. In this case, the threat was collective. As Bob Dylan sang, in 1963, in Ta/kin' World War III Blues: " ... now it seems, Everybody's having them dreams."

Did the looming threat of nuclear annihilation affect the psyches and life choices of a generation of baby boomers? Does looming ecological catastrophe affect the psyches and life choices of those who are coming of age today? The collective circumstances of Moshe's childhood and adolescence, including pogroms, war, and displacement, are no secret. They were so onerous that many in his generation did not survive, and of those who did, many would have done almost anything so as not to call up the associated feelings. By many, the painful circumstances were repressed, in the inter- 16 -

est of moving on. Some fled, some stayed and fought, and some thought it best to create their own state, where they could defend themselves and thrive. Thus we are confronted here with both the obvious and its elusiveness. Repression-or dissociation-has its uses, but they are limited. Even if we are inclined to cut off our roots on account of the pain and suffering associated with them, in our depths we can't, because our roots are us. Moshe's own credo, cited here from The Potent Self, is all the more touching, because he was part of a generation of Zionist pioneers for whom the negation of the past formed a part of their ideology. Do not try to forget the past; it is impossible to forget the past without forgetting oneself at the same time . You may imagine that you have forgotten one or another unwanted detail, but it is stamped in some part of your body . Yet that past experience, awful as it may have been, can be used now to make your present a vital basis for a fuller , more absorbingly interesting future. When you have learned to accept the past and you have made peace with it, then it will leave you in peace. 5

In his 1998 essay in the Austrian Feldenkrais Guild's Rundbrief, Feldenkrais practitioner and historian Werner Kraus considers the complexity of Feldenkrais' relationship to his past: "Once, when Moshe was asked where he was born, he answered, with apparent wit, 'In bed, where else?' However, when one considers the fate of Slavuta and Baranovichi, the distress and sorrow behind his wit become apparent. "6 Slavuta, now in Ukraine, was Moshe's birthplace, and Baranovichi, now in Belarus, was where he lived for approximately five years, from just before the beginning of the First World War until just before its end. And the fate of these two towns was this: almost all of their Jewish inhabitants were shot and buried in large pits, and those communities were utterly destroyed. If we exclude this from our picture of Moshe, are we not colluding in the repression of the obvious? And do we collude because it is how our own culture handles such information?

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It matters that there is an elephant in the room.

One of the things that we know-and collude to forgetis that merely being a Jew was either illegal, quasi-legal, extremely dangerous, or all of the above, in much of Europe for a large part of the last two millennia. In the area where Moshe Feldenkrais was raised, all of the above prevailed from 1648 until 1941, and it ended, as described above, with the most bestial slaughter of almost all of the Jewish inhabitants. And even today, in 2014, in much of Europe, not to mention North Africa and the Middle East, to speak the word "Jew" out loud in mixed company-even among the most well-educated and reasonable people-is to invite a cloud of rather complex feelings into the room. Try it your self if you think I am exaggerating. It matters that the Method comes from Israel.

Moshe 's early work was learning to survive, his later work about learning itself . You learn so you can survive, and you survive so you can continue to learn. The choice to survive and thrive lies behind the creation of the State of Israel, with which Moshe's story is intimately bound. This is where the Feldenkrais Method was first taught, and where all of the extremely influential first generation of Feldenkrais teachers were trained. Moshe's own path, from self-defence to auto-suggestion to Judo to the Feldenkrais Method, suited precisely the needs of a community in the process of re-creating itself. It matters how one learns to think.

Elsewhere in his essay in Rundbrief, after a brief review of Hasidism, Werner Kraus writes: "This was the deeply-rooted intellectual tradition that, although Moshe was not a religious man, was a part of his intellectual quality."

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This intellectual tradition is generally left out of our picture of Feldenkrais, despite Moshe's own hints to the contrary. If there are aspects of Moshe's gift that defy our understanding, it would make sense to look there, no? In the papers that came from the First European Feldenkrais Conference, held in Heidelberg in 1995, Feldenkrais trainer Larry Goldfarb wrote: The method created by Moshe Feldenkrais is grounded in his experience as a martial artist, physicist, and teacher. With remarkable creativit y and ingenuity , he developed a way of teaching based on an experiential approach to pedagogy and a systemic understanding of the design of the human body. His manner of teaching emphasized the student's experience of moving; this preference extended to his process of training teachers. We know that his unique approach was borrowed from the sciences, especially from his training in physics and mechanics as well as from the understanding of applied anatomy and from research in the neurosciences . While he referred to these ideas, he did not develop an explicit explanation for his methodology; indeed, he often frustrated his students ' attempts to do so.8 The possibility suggests itself, then, that some of that methodology comes from a place we have not been looking, perhaps even from a way of learning where the frustration of students is a cherished tradition! To try to understand Moshe without considering his background is like putting a fish on the table and wondering what the fins do . Speaking of fish, here is an old Jewish riddle: Itzik: "What is green, hangs on the wall, and whistles?" Yankele: "I give up ." Itzik: A herring. Yankele: "A herring?! A herring isn't green!" Itzik: "So, it's not green!" Yankele: "And a herring doesn 't hang on the wall!" Itzik: "Nu, so a herring doesn't hang on the wall ... Yankele: "And a herring doesn't whistle!" Itzik: "Aha! I just put that in to throw you off the track!" 11

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Itzik's riddle recalls the teaching model of Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, whom Moshe greatly admired. Gurdjieff was a notorious trickster, and what the trickster does, what the Zen master does , is designed to wake you up. This is the sense of Itzik's riddle: If what we want is the truth, we may have to develop the tools to go behind, to deconstruct what is offeredin sum, to think paradoxically. Moshe comes from a tradition which makes this sort of demand. The following little Hasidic teaching, cited by Martin Buber, is very much to the point: Moses was to say just these words to them , no more and no less, so that they might feel: Something is hidden here , and we must strive to discover it for ourselve s.9

It matters how Moshe was educated. A German Feldenkrais colleague told me that when she was the early fifties in the Ruhr district-and her class was acting in an undisciplined fashion, the teacher would say to her students: "Why don't you go to the Jewish school?" It was, of course, a rather sadistic question to have put to one's young students in the ruins of Cologne, when there were few Jewish students and fewer Jewish schools, and where mere attendance at a Jewish school had only recently been a ticket to hell. However, having spent some time in Jewish schools in happier days and places, on both sides of the teacher's desk, I have my own notions of what she might have been alluding to. I once had the opportunity, one Saturday afternoon, to study a Hasidic text with a rabbi trained in the traditional manner. He would chant the text in Hebrew, and then he would chant a taytsh, his interpretation of the text in Yiddish. And, though we two were alone in the living room of his home at the time, he was singing very loudly. Later, I asked a friend, who was more conversant in traditional education than I, why my rabbinic friend had been singing so much louder than he had been talking. 11Aha," my colleague replied, 11 As a student of Talmud, your friend had been accustomed to study with a partner, in a large room full of pairs of students, all chanting to each other at the same time. They had to be loud to be heard." An ingenue, or, for in school-in

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that matter, an anti-Semite, passing by such a study hall, could not fail to be impressed, if not terrified, by the clamour. Likewise, our putative ingenue wandering into a traditional synagogue might be shocked at the freedom with which the children cavort without remonstrance among the legs of the worshippers, who are themselves praying aloud and swaying at various speeds. Traditional Jewish worship and learning both embody an idea of decorum which respects the spontaneity and curiosity of children. On the other hand, what would a Feldenkrais practitioner see if she or he were to wander into my colleague's elementary school in postwar Germany? First, children are expected to sit quietly and obey. It goes without saying that the teacher is the undisputed authority. The stu dent s are expected to "learn" what they are told-which is always correct. If questioning has a role in this model, it has to do with clarifying what the teacher has said, and not with developing independent thinking. In this model of learning , the child must abandon him- or herself , or, at the very least, go into hiding. This is structurally similar to visiting a physician of the old school, and being told what is going on with you . He or she knows; you don't. And how could you?! Meanwhile, in the traditional Jewish school, students are studying the Talmud. They are encouraged to sit in on the arguments among famous rabbis, as transcribed in enormous folios. And they do so in pairs, so that the process of finding the truth becomes a process of living dialogue : Students approach the Talmud with a study partner ... Without a teacher imparting knowledge through authoritative lectures, the partners' discussion drives them through the issues in the text as they debate and react to one another ... God's Truth is so big that it is mysterious and must be explored with a companion to ensure against getting trapped in your own limited understanding. The truth is never fully revealed to one of us, because we can only survey the horizon from our own perspective. Each partner-through discussion, disagreement , and agreement-shares in the Absolute, getting a glimpse of the Truth from an oblique angle relying on your chevrutah [study partner] to reveal more to you than you could see from your own vantage point.** - 21 -

This is structurally similar to Functional Integration; we are exploring the same question together. Learning to ask is learning to learn, and a range of answers appears on its own in the light of shared enquiry. It matters that body/mind therapies are anti-Fascist. It is useful to recall the historical setting of the birth of Psycho-

analysis, the Feldenkrais Method, Gestalt Therapy, Bio-Energetics, etc. These teachings, all clearly anti-authoritarian, emerged against a background of massive social reaction, which was inclined to mobilize the hatred of Jews for totalitarian ends. We tend to forget about that background, and the struggle that was required, although it took up a good part of the twentieth century and cost the lives of well over sixty million people . Moshe's thinking clearly did not emerge from the cultural mainstream, but from an "alternate" Europe that had been marginalised and oppressed for centuries. Likewise, the thinking of Arno Gruen, Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Perls, Charlotte Selver, Heinrich Jacoby and Alice Miller (all of them refugees from National Socialism) was also anti-authoritarian, and emerged from that same "alternate" Europe. Thus it is no accident that the work of these pioneers is, implicitly (as with Feldenkrais), if not explicitly (as with Reich, Gruen, and Miller), a way to climb out of authoritarian body armour. The body/mind pioneers named above grasped what fascism was-not exclusively as political opponents, but as students of the human soul. Whether consciously or not, they were surely motivated, for reasons both personal and professional, to diagnose and resolve its pathology . They were, in effect, forced to get to the bottom of a craziness that was trying to kill them and all of their families . Thus, as it was Chinese Communism that sent Tibetan Buddhism to the west, it was anti-Semitic totalitarianism that sent body/mind science into exile, where it thrived. Psychoanalyst Arno Gruen describes, in The Betrayal of the Self, a weekend workshop taught by Dr. Feldenkrais in Munich in 1979 to a large group of physicians, professors, and medical administrators.*** After two days of Awareness Through Movement lessons, and much improvement in range and freedom of motion, - 22 -

... general dissatisfaction broke out in the workshop group. Participants became critical of Feldenkrais, directing anger and aggression toward him. It was as though the sudden freedom itself had produced disquiet and anxiety. And well it might have: Feldenkrais was not proposing a fine-tuning of what his weekend students were already good at; he was proposing another way of learning. And in order to enter this way of learning, they would have to divest themselves of their chairs, their suit-jackets, their professional status and authority, and lie on the floor of the hotel. And (though Arno Gruen does not mention this in his book-it would presumably have been taken for granted by his readers at the time) Feldenkrais was proposing this mode of learning to people most of whom had either come of age in the Third Reich or been raised by those who had. (Today, there are hundreds of Feldenkrais practitioners in Munich!) In his movement work, Feldenkrais early came to recognize the coerciveness of socialization in inhibiting and diminishing our potential for learning. In retraining patients with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis and other difficulties, it was the thinking and wrong experience with our bodies that stood in the way of growth, and was often responsible for the severity of malfunctioning. Forced upon us by the socialization process, these thought patterns steer our bodies towards adaptation, for that is what promised us social and therefore emotional security. Such thinking inevitably leads to the splitting off of our body sensations. And this kind of separation, which brings a splitting of feelings in its wake, makes it extremely difficult for a self to emerge on the basis of our own experiences. - Amo Gruen, from The Need to Punish: The PoliticalConsequencesof Identifying with the Aggressor.[www.arnogruen.net]

It matters that belief doesn't matter. Feldenkrais was not a believer, and some in our community have, understandably, taken this to mean he was no longer Jewish. But this is to confuse apples with oranges. In Christianity, belief is the determining factor of one's religious identity. Thus, in North America, under the dominant influence of Christianity, one speaks ofJudaism as one "faith" among many. - 23 -

And it is true that if you do not believe in Christ as saviour, you are not considered a Christian. Likewise, if you are an "unbeliever" (kafir) you are not considered a Muslim. But if you convert to Judaism, and you go into your interview with the rabbinical court (three rabbis at one table) they will ask you about your practice-Le., what you do. It is possible your beliefs will not even be discussed, because this would be considered intrusive. It is not that beliefs are irrelevant to Judaism, but they take a back seat to practice, and for well-articulated pedagogical reasons . This reasoning was spelled out, most likely in Barcelona, more than 700 years ago in the Book of Education (sefer ha-chinuch), to the effect that the way to transform the inner life is through actions. Does this sound familiar? Feldenkrais was born into a thoroughly Jewish society, in a little town situated in the epicentre of Jewish mysticism, to a family which celebrated its connection to one of the spir itual heroes of that tradition. He was proud of his heritage, spoke of it often, quoted the teachings of his childhood, and affirmed time and again his spiritual connection to a great Hasidic master. His first two languages were spoken only by Jews. He risked his life, first to get to British Mandate Palestine, and then many times over in the defence of the Jewish settlement there. In the fifties, he was a personal coach to the founders of the reborn Jewish state. (The current president of Israel, Shimon Peres, does Feldenkrais every day; he is the oldest head of state in the world.) And when Mosh e left Israel in the seventies to teach in the U.S., he left ten commandments for his students posted on the door of his studio, and signed them, with a wink and a nod to familiar usage, "Moshe, the servant of God and your faithful servant." This is what he did; what he believed is his business. It matters that Abraham smashed idols. In the tradition from which Moshe emerged always been a diversity of voices. Some were more tive, while others raged at the established order. It kind of tradition where disagreement means death, damnation, for that matter.

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there has conservais not the or eternal

If Abraham was the first Jew, he got there by smashing the idols in his father's shop; then there was Jesus, and Spinoza, and Marx, and Einstein, and Freud, et al. You get the picture. Moshe's own life was devoted, not to repeating the same answers as his forefathers, but to answering as freshly and concretely as possible the same questions as his forefathers. And, in this, he was more successful than many . When Rabbi Noah, Rabbi Mordechai 's son, assumed the succession after his father's death, his disciples noticed that there were a number of ways in which he conducted himself differently from his father, and asked him about this. "I do just as my father did," he replied. "He did not imitate, and I do not imitate. " 1

And that's why it matters.

Nothing in the following chapters is intended to diminish the importance of other more or less well-known influences on Moshe's work, which include Forel and Com~,Judo, mechanical and electrical engineering, physics, nuclear physics, neurophysiology, the teachings of Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti , Zen Buddhism, and the somatic advances of Moshe's contemporaries, including Gindler, Jacoby, Todd, F.M. Alexander, Gerda Alexander, not to mention Freud, Reich, et al. The intention here is not to narrow the picture, but to fill it out.**** We will soon be travelling to another time and space, where a very particular mindset is in play. This means learning, and learning means passing through confusion! Much will be new and strange! This is as it should be! Online support is available! Take lots of rests! Wear loose and comfortable clothing! Drink lots of water! Please get up and move between chapters! * See note on p. 123 . ** Curiously enough , th e author of these lines, Prof. Steven Gimbel, is leading up to an argument connecting Einstein's thought to the Talmudic mode of study. Is light a partide ? Or, is light a wave? Yes! [Steven Gimbel, Einstein's Jewish Sdence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2012)] - 25 -

*** My thanks to trainer Ned Dwelle, who attended this workshop, for filling me in on the background. See Arno Gruen, The Betrayal of the Self(New York: Grove Press, 1988) . **** The late Mark Reese laboured for years on an authorized biography of Moshe Feldenkrais; the community looks forward to its completion and publication. Another biograph y, in German, is currently being prepared by Christian Buckard, who produced a fascinating series of radio broadcasts entitled "Mr. Hokuspokus ." (fhis was the name that Paula Ben Gurion, wife of Israel's first prime minister, gave to her husband 's personal trainer, Moshe Feldenkrais. You can find these broadcasts on YouTube.)

Moshe Feldenkrais, Thinking and Doing (Longmont: Genesis II, 2013) 4. Moshe Feldenkrais, Body and Mature Behaviour (New York: International Universities Press, 1949) 1. 2 Sengstan, 3rd Zen patriarch, (Richard Clarke, trans .) Hsin Hsin Ming: Verses on the Faith Mind (Virginia Beach : Alan Clements, 1976) . 3 Jeff Haller , personal communication, March, 2007. 4 Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Wrapped in a Hol y Flame : Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003) 224. 5 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Guide to Spontaneity (New York: Harper Collins, 1985 ) vii. 6 This article appears in Werner Kraus, ed. "Mashes Wurzeln," Moshe Feldenkrais: 1904-2004; zum 100. Geburtstag (Graz: Institut fur Bewegungsmanagement: Eigenverlag) 31. (D.K., trans.) 7 Kraus, 30. 8 Larry Goldfarb, "Science is Catching up with us. Will we be Ready?" This article in the papers of the First European Feldenkrais Conference (Heidelberg: International Feldenkrais Federation, 1995). 9 Martin Buber, ed., (0. Marx, trans. ) Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings fNew York: Schocken Books, 1947) 62. 10 See Appendix III. 11 Martin Buber, ed., (0. Marx , trans. ) Tales of the Hasidim: The Later Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1948) 157. IA 18

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Prologue The world into which Moshe Feldenkrais was born is quickly passing from living memory, though it has left an indelible imprint on the modern world. I speak here of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry. When Moshe was teaching in Tel Aviv, there were many people around who remembered it, and much of what is written here would have been taken for granted. Now, however, when Moshe's teachings have gone out all around the world, there are fewer and fewer around who remember where Moshe came from, and what that might tell us about the man and his teachings. Moshe was born in the so-called Pale of Settlement, the western border regions of the old Russian Empire, which is today made up of the countries of Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Moldova and some parts of Russia itself . In this region, stretching from the Baltic Sea in the north-west to the Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea in the south-east, there developed, over the course of nine centuries, the most thoroughly idiosyncratic Jewish culture that the Diaspora has produced. In the words of the late Hasidic scholar, poet, and civil rights activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, it was in that place and time that the Jewish people attained its "highest degree of inwardness." Not unrelatedly, in the same place and time, it experienced its lowest degree of integration with the surrounding cultures . 1 This was a culture with not one but three of its own languages-two sacred and one secular-a culture that placed the highest value on scholarship and intellectual ingenuity. Though most of its people were very poor, literacy, if not in Hebrew and Aramaic, then in Yiddish, was close to universal. It was a world, writes Heschel, where "the sense of a man's life lies in his perfecting the world. 112 These were Moshe's people, and this-despite all the transformations he experienced-was the sense of Moshe's life. The Hasidic movement, a spiritual and social impulse that emerged in what is now Ukraine and went on to change the face of Judaism, is one of the most remarkable creations of that culture. Charismatic and warm-hearted, Hasidism brought back to European Judaism an appreciation of the sensual universe, of - 27 -

music and dance, of joyous camaraderie, and of one's personal responsibility for one's own improvement. On his mother's side, Moshe's lineage is said to go back to one of the major figures of the movement, the legendary and beloved Hasidic rabbi-teacher-leader-healer-counsellor-(it's a lot easier to use the Hebrew word, tzaddik)-Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz. Moshe spoke often, and with pride, of this connection. On his father's side, there was another luminary who also figured prominently in Moshe's sense of himself. In his autobiographical video (1983), 3 he goes on at length about Rabbi Yona, "the good and the beneficent." Who were these Hasidic forebears, why were they so revered, and what was their teaching? And what, you may ask, does this lineage have to do with what Moshe taught? I trust that these connections will become apparent as you read . Meanwhile, let us get our bearings in another world.

1 Abraham Jo shua Heschel, "The Eastern European Era in Jewish History ," in Deborah Dash Moore, ed., East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual (Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 1990) 2. 2 Heschel, 13. 3 Moshe Feldenkrais, autobiographical interview, unpublished video recording (Paris: International Feldenkrais Federation , 1981). The IFF Archive of the Feldenkrais Method was established in 2002 with the generous support of the Feldenkrais family.

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Section

One: Roots

Chapter 1 The Lost World of Ashkenaz Moshe-Pinchas Feldenkrais (1904-1984) was born in the village of Slavuta (or Slovita, in Yiddish) in Ukraine. Wait, let me clarify that: if you were in Slavuta today, you would be in Ukraine. For centuries the area has known a totally bewildering succession of overlords: Lithuania, Austria, Poland, Russia, Poland, Russia, . Germany, and Russia again, and again, not necessarily in that order. It is no wonder people are confused about where Moshe was born. If you were born the same year as Moshe, and had stayed in Slavuta, and were granted some sort of safe-conduct pass to protect you from pogroms, revolution, civil war, famine, Stalinist purges and SS death squads, you would have been in Poland, Soviet Ukraine, the Nazi Reich, Soviet Ukraine again, and, most recently, an independent Ukraine-all without benefit of travel. Unless, of course, you were in Crimea, in which case you are, as of 2014, no longer in Ukraine. A good set of historical maps is useful in understanding this chapter. Unfortunately, the map has not been invented that will change its borders, its languages, its ruling powers, and the names of its towns, provinces, and regions that often. It appears that fortune does not favour flat political entities that sit between empires. Within the region, many languages were spoken: Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Belarusian, German, Russian, Romany, Romanian, etc. Obviously, the ruling power decided which language would be the official one and which ones would be - 29 -

discouraged. As we have seen in the most recent mix-up in Ukraine (2014), a proposed change in the status of the Russian language by the post-Maidan parliament was used by dissidents as a justification to take up arms. But even with a magic map and a pile of dictionaries, one needs a good imagination to reconstruct the world into which Moshe was born .. . because it no longer exists. A 21st-century visitor could be excused for not noticing that this area was once the centre of gravity of the entire Jewish world.

Ashkenaz and Sefarad In the medieval period, the European Jewish world had two principal centres: one in the Iberian Peninsula (contemporary Spain and Portugal) and one in the Rhineland (part of what we call Germany). Jews came to plant grapevines along the sunny banks of the Rhine shortly after the Roman legions arrived. Jewish communities, speaking a variant of Middle German, and writing it down in Hebrew letters, were well established in such places as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, etc., by approximately 1000 C.E. The Iberian Peninsula was known in Hebrew as Sefarad, and Jews had been living there for at least 1,500 years when they were expelled, in the year 1492, in the reign of Queen Isabella. These refugees resettled themselves primarily around the Mediterranean, and, to this day, their descendants are known as Sefaradim. The region where Germanic languages were spoken was known as Ashkenaz, and its Jews, and their descendants, are known as Ashkenazim. Moshe was an Ashkenazic Jew, and his mother-tongue was a Germanic language, with a fair proportion of its vocabulary drawn from Hebrew and Aramaic, and more than a trace of Slavic influence . This rich stew of a language is called Yiddish.

The Crusades The Crusades were an attempt on the part of Catholic Europe to wrest the lands of the Bible from the control of Islam. In the First Crusade (1096), crusaders on their way to the Holy Land rehearsed for Holy War by falling upon the Jewish communities of central Europe, and they did the same on their way back. The flight of Jews from what is now called Germany into what is now called Poland began at that time - 30 -

and continued for a couple of centuries as Crusade followed bloody Crusade. Holy War made Ashkenaz a risky neighbourhood for Jews; it also left a bad impression in the Levant.

The Black Death In the 14th century, the bubonic plague killed a large proportion of the population of Europe-some say one-third, perhaps more . Unlike the Crusades and other grim compulsions that have reddened the soil of Europe in past centuries, the Black Death was an equal-opportunity destroyer. It proceeded from village to village without regard to age, creed, gender, ethnicity, experience with witchcraft or, for that matter, sexual preference . While this was happening, it seemed to many, and not unreasonably, that the end of the world was at hand. This was centuries before the germ theory of disease was proposed, and long before the role of rats and fleas in the transmission of plague germs was understood. So what did people think was the cause of the plague? There were various narratives available. The medical faculty of the University of Paris preferred a scientific one: it was due to a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40 th degree of Aquarius. This explanation apparently did not satisfy the need for a scapegoat. Enter, in tandem, the Church, the Jews, and the devil. According to the teachings of the Catholic Church at the time, Jews belonged to the same existential category as the devil him/herself. Jews were accused of poisoning wells and causing an epidemic in order to achieve world domination (this from the institution that dominated the western world). This libel was especially virulent in the Rhineland, where more than two hundred Jewish communities were put to the torch and the sword in the second half of the 14th century. In some communities, Jews opted for mass suicide in preference to death at the hands of the mob. The historian Barbara Tuchman sees this period as a watershed in the relationship of Jews and Christians in Western Europe:

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[The accusation of] well-poisoning and its massacres had fixed the malevolent image of the Jew into a stereotype ... Former contacts of scholars, physicians, and financial "court Jews" with the Gentile community faded. The period of the Jews' medieval flourishing was over. The walls of the ghetto, though not yet physical, had risen. 1

Poland as the Promised Land Many survivors fled eastward to Poland, where King Kasimir III (1310-1370) extended his welcome, and where, owing to a strict quarantine, the plague had done less damage. Meanwhile, Jewish immigrants were also arriving in Poland from the Italian peninsula and the Balkans and beyond. Wherever they came from, for around three centuries, while periodic expulsions and persecutions convulsed the places we now know as England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal, Jews came to consider Poland "the promised land ." In fact, Poland actually was a haven of relatively equal civil status, communal self-government, and social peace. Before long it had surpassed the Rhineland as a centre of Jewish cultural and religious life . With the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, Poland-including what is now called Ukraine and Belarus-became the pre-eminent intellectual centre of European Jewry. And, though its light was diminished through poverty, oppression, and emigration, the area was still the middle-point of Jewish life when Moshe Feldenkrais was born there, in 1904. Our review of history will resume in chapter 4, in the year 1648. Meanwhile, let's look at the intellectual and spiritual foundations of that vanished world.

1

Barbara Tuchman,

A Distant Mirror (New York: Knopf, 1978) 102-103.

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Chapter 2 Spiritual and Intellectual Foundations I For a few hundred years-between the mid-14th century and the mid-17th century-the Jewish communities of old Poland were essentially self-governing. From a cultural point of view, they were also more independent of their milieu than they had been in Germany. They had their own Germanic language, Yiddish, which, with its admixture of Hebrew and Aramaic words, was incomprehensible to their Slavic-speaking neighbours. They had their own schools, law courts, musical culture, etc. The foundation of Jewish life, and the major factor that distinguished Jews from the surrounding populations , was the personal and communal observance of the mitzvot (singular, mitzvah). The mitzvot are the "do's and don 'ts" of living, as prescribed and proscribed in the Torah. The acceptance and the fulfillment of the "yoke of the Torah"-then (as now) , a 24/7 discipline-was the destiny of individual and family and community. And thus, the study of the Torah was the core of Jewish education.*

Torah What is Torah? The word means teaching, law, guidance and way-and much more. In its most narrow sense , the Torah is a long parchment scroll, mounted on two wooden rollers, and read through in the synagogue, from beginning to end, every year. It contains the "Five Books of Moses, the core of the Hebrew Bible. In a broader sense, however, Torah represents the inner truth of the universe, and the teachings that lead to it. For example, you could say that Rabbi So-and-So's Torah (his teaching) was deep and inspiring. When Moshe 's ancestor Pinchas of Koretz taught that all the sciences are branches of the Torah, he was alluding to a central truth behind all phenomena. So Torah is a big word, with many dimensions, and it is not the equivalent of "Bible" as the word is used in the phrase "back to the Bible." Traditionally, one speaks of the "written Torah" -the scroll of the Five Books of Moses-and the "oral Torah ." The 11

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latter is a vast body of commentary on the former. To call it the "oral Torah" is a bit confusing, because, after centuries as an oral tradition, much of it, too, was written down, and preserved in the enormous collection known as the Talmud. Nevertheless, "oral Torah" continues to develop; it is not a "closed book," so to speak . Thus, in Jewish culture, the "Bible" as written is only the beginning of the story. The rest of the story lies in the tradition of interpretation, and the community of scholars who carry it forward. In this way, Torah is both fixed (written) and flexible (oral), evolving through the centuries, with different qualities coming to the fore at different times.

Levels of Interpretation The tradition of interpretation permits many simultaneous levels of understanding . In fact , the Hebrew language, which is remarkably rich in allusions, all but requires a multi-level approach . There is the superficial level, what we might call "Bible stories." There is the allegorical level. There is the symbolic level. There is a mystical level. There are all kinds of interpretative tricks, wordplay, numerology, and so forth. The result is that creative interpretation can flow from one phrase, one word, or even one letter of a text . While it is possible to argue for one interpretation above the others, it is not in the Jewish experience to rest content with a one-dimensional interpretation of anything . Those who insist that such and such a Biblical passage means only one thing are holding in their hands a translation, and not the Torah.

Talmud The Talmud was collected and edited in the first few centuries C.E. This occurred in the two main centres of Jewish scholarship at the time, places now known as Iraq and Israel. Of these two Jewish centres, Babylonia (Iraq) was by far the more prominent one. (The departure of the last Jews from Iraq, after the American invasion, ended a sojourn of about 2500 years.) The Talmud is a big set of big books, but you don't learn it by taking it off the shelf and reading it. It is something you jump into, with a teacher and a study partner. In a certain - 34 -

sense the Talmud (the word itself means "study") consists of the record of generations of discussions of the foundations of Jewish civilization, namely, the Torah and the rites and customs practised over centuries .

Training in Thinking Some of these discussions concern matters, such as Temple sacrifice, which had already been irrelevant to the daily life of Jews for hundreds of years when the Talmud was written down. On the other hand, and we will want to remember this as our discussion deepens, Talmud study is not actually about its subject matter. It is about a process, a manner of engagement with a question. It is a training in thinking. According to the French Rabbi and philosopher Marc-Alain Ouaknin, whose works were recommended to me by French Feldenkrais trainer Myriam Pfeffer, this form of study gave priority to the question over the answer. The role of the question is to create an opening: an answer suppresses the opening, the richness of possibility. 1 The Talmud nurtures a particular way of using the brain, a way of thinking that is quick-witted, attentive, sharply challenging and yet accepting, non-monolithic, open-ended . To study Talmud is to enter a sort of multigenerational chat room for sages. You are free to take part. No one has to agree with anything, but everyone has to be able to justify their positions based on a common methodology. You enter into this discourse for its own sake, and you learn how to think like a sage. Torah is the text; Talmud is about interrogating the text to come up with answers that are appropriate to your needs. Talmud study was also the occasion of remarkable feats of memory, as many scholars learned the entire thing-with its many folio-sized volumes in Hebrew and Aramaic-by heart. This is especially challenging since a page of Talmud is not one continuous narrative, but a core text enveloped in layers of commentaries.

Torah and Talmud: A Portable Homeland For a society that saw itself as living in exile, in both time and space, the Torah and the Talmud, and the ordered life they prescribed, served as the constitution of a portable home- 35 -

land. In a society that valued learning above all things, mastery of the Talmud was the ticket to influence and respect.

* We are looking here at the male side of a traditional society, at a time when gender roles, within the religious sphere and in all areas of daily life, were firmly differentiated. Thus, when we talk about traditional education from the 14th through the 19th centuries, it is understood that the curriculum was very different for boys and girls, as were the opportunities to make a contribution to it. 1

Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Ouvertures hassidiques (Paris: Grancher, 1990) 158 .

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Chapter 3 Spiritual and Intellectual Foundations

II

If Talmudic learning could be described as hyper-rational, there was another way of taking on the same material, one which used another part of the brain and was reserved for mature students only. This was Kabbalah, the mystical tradition, represented especially by its core work, the Zohar. Here another logic applies-imaginative, poetic, intuitive, even erotic. In the Zohar and the speculations that surrounded it, one could breathe a whiff of the sacred feminine. If She is largely missing in the Talmud, She is the star of Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah is not one particular method, any more than Talmud is one particular school of interpretation. The word suggests, among other things, "what has been received. It refers to an evolving body of traditions whose goal is to understand the nature of reality, and to find one's place in the process of creation . The mystical tradition in Judaism is as ancient as the religion itself, and maybe older. Though it has always maintained a presence in Jewish life, it has had its seasons of embrace and rejec tion. In the Hasidic realm, Kabbalah, and particularly the so-called Lurianic Kabbalah, * was front and centre, a core ideology . On the other hand, in western Europe and the U.S., for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, assimilating Jews found Kabbalah acutely embarrassing, and swept it under the rug. The pendulum continues to swing, of course, and what was hidden in Horodenka is now hip in Hollywood . Since reverence for Kabbalah was firmly rooted in the milieu from which Moshe emerged, we will need to peek into the Kabbalistic universe ourselves. Please be my guest as we try to lift the veil for a moment on a particular view of the nature of reality. And permit me to clarify at the outset that what follows in this chapter is the reportage of a visitor to the Kabbalistic library, not the testimony of a Kabbalistic practitioner. Moreover, even for a practitioner, it would be impossible to convey the tradition in language alone. With these constraints in mind, let's plunge right in with the big question : What is reality? 11

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A Dynamic, Flowing Creation Jewish mysticism is based on a very dynamic concept of the Divine . It may surprise or even shock someone who is stuck with a Sunday-school notion of a remote and bearded deity, sitting in the director's chair-in other words, the God that atheists don't believe in-to find God represented as a dynamic process of continuous creation . These dynamics are multi-dimensional and paradoxical, and, as mentioned above, impossible to explain with words alone .

To help us tune in to the dynamics of creation, there are all kinds of symbols and diagrams, parables and myths. In the simplified diagram above, these dynamics are represented schematically, in two dimensions, as the "tree of life." This tree does not exist; it is only a map of functional relationships. The ten small circles represent the sefirot, steps or stages of creation, or creative principles, or ... And these sefirot are connected by twenty-two pathways, corresponding to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet . There is a column of - 38 -

expansion and a column of contraction and a central column of balance. The large circles represent interpenetrating worlds. And that's just the start, because you can't see the other similar maps that are connected to this one, within and without and in all directions surrounding it. It is an enormously complex diagram, as if you could draw a map of Manhattan with all of the relationships of all of the people included in the map, not to mention the subway stops and the air space and all the restaurants, good and bad. It tries to give an idea of how the impulse of creativity flows from its root in an unknowable realm of undifferentiated possibility, through four different worlds, each with different rules and different qualities of space and time, into existence as we know it. Quite a map. It cannot be read; but if you stare at it for a lifetime or two, it may yield its secrets to you. It is a map that works on many levels, in the same way that fractals recapitulate the same pattern in many orders of magnitude. Thus, while it is a map of the way the universe holds together, it is also a map of our own inner life. This explains why mystics seek self-knowledge-because, if God is reflected in everything, the nearest place to look for Him/Her is inside. This "dynamic process of continuous creation" which is God, and also manifest in ourselves, is reflected in every world, and the various worlds are not separate, nor can they be separated. They are, so to speak, all inside of one another. The four worlds designated in the diagram of the Kabbalistic tree have many names and applications. The most literal translations of their Hebrew names are emanation, creation, formation, and action. As these worlds appear in the individual , they have been described broadly as the spiritual realm, the intellectual realm, the emotional realm, and the realm of action. These worlds are interactive; a change anywhere is a change everywhere . Note: this tree is upside down. The creative impulse flows from the roots , which are "above, 11 into the trunk, the branches, and the fruit , which are "below ." But those roots are not just "above, 11 they are also "within." They are "now," as well as "before." And so, all the worlds are accessible right here and now, in the "world of action, 11 where I am writing and you are reading. - 39 -

If this sounds complex and abstract, think of it this way: if my spine is more flexible, my thinking may be more spacious, my feelings more fluid, and my sensations are likely to be different, as well. Four worlds right there, all interpenetrating -but more on Feldenkrais later!

Implications for Human Behaviour The radical implication of this multidimensional flow is that we, too-to the extent that we have something to do with our own flow-also have a part in creation. Today, the notion that we are co-creators of reality is everywhere, but, like most "new age" thinking, it is not new at all. In the form of deliberately obscure, carefully guarded teachings, it has been accompanying us through the ages. As we will see in greater detail in the chapters that follow, Hasidism took these hidden teachings and placed them front and centre so that each individual becomes a responsible actor in the drama of creation . For we have work to do . The reason why we have been created, our mission in this realm, is to help repair a broken world. Lurianic Kabbalah holds that, in the very act that created the world, a certain disharmony was introduced into the primal dynamic, into the body/mind of God, if you will. There are various metaphors to explain how this happened and different ways to represent this disharmony, or fracture. Warning: Do not take these metaphors literally! Like good poetry, they are there to inspire insight, not to replace it. According to one Kabbalistic teaching, for Creation itself to happen, God must withdraw His/Her totality from the world, to open a space for the whole story to unfold. One aspect of the Divine remains in the physical world, and this is the feminine aspect, the in-dwelling, or immanent aspect, known as the Presence (Shechinah). Meanwhile, the transcendent aspect of God remains beyond our apprehension, sustaining, surrounding, containing the world. She is here, and He is there. These two aspects of the Divine, feminine and masculine, in-dwelling and surrounding, need to be reunited. And who is going to do this, you may ask? We are. (There are other aspects to this teaching, and I won't try to relate them all. For our purposes, just remember that however we represent this primordial disconnect in reality, the Lurianic tradition holds that it is our job to fix it.) - 40 -

How is it within our power to have an influence on this vast system? Well, since each of us has something of the Divine in us, every aspect of our behaviour-every thought, word and deed-has a resonance in the higher and lower worlds. Professor Samuel Dresner, author of The Zaddik, wrote: Each word, each act of man , depending on the manner in which it is spoken and the way it is performed , serves either to widen the breach or to help restore the unity that once prevailed ... God would be one only when mankind would be one. 1

Doing is not enough In restoring harmony to the universe, the particular action is important, but not as important as the way it is done. You have to be present when you do it. Here is a little Hasidic story that illustrates the point: One day in the synagogue, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev seemed to be observing a group of his Hasidim as the y prayed . When the y were finished , he approached them with a hearty greeting, "Shalom aleichem! " They looked startled to hear their rabbi pronounce the greeting traditionally given after returning from a long journe y. "But Rabbi," they said, "we have not been an ywhere!" The rabbi continued to shake hands with them , as though the y were travellers arriving in Berditchev. He said, "From your faces it was obvious that your thoughts were in the grain market in Odessa or the wool market in Lodz. None of you were actually here while you recited the prayers, so I was glad to welcome you back once you stopped .112

Moshe Feldenkrais quoted the following passage, from the 10th-century Egyptian sage Sa'adia Gaon, in his book on autosuggestion (1929): "He who prays without an intention in his heart, his prayer is not heard. "3 And Pinchas expressed it with a twist: "There are no words which, in themselves, are useless. There are no actions which, in themselves, are useless. But one can make useless both actions and words by saying or doing them uselessly." 4

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Four Bells Ringing Here are four core premises of Kabbalistic thinking that flow one from the other and have a bearing on our exploration: 1) A dynamic, continuous flow of organization pervades all levels of creation. 2) All levels of creation are found in one another, and affect one another. 3) We, too , are part of this picture, and everything we do has an influence on the unity or disunity of all levels of creation. 4) The influence we have comes more from the inner organization of the self than from the outer form of an act. In other words: more from the how than from the what.

After this short excursion into the intellectual and spiritual foundations of a very particular culture, let us turn back to its history, and the year 1648.

*Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed (1534 -1572) contributed a number of new concepts to Kabbalistic thinking. The form of Kabbalah adopted by Hasidism is thus known as "Lurianic Kabbalah ," to distinguish it from previous formulations. 'Samuel H. Dresner , The Zaddik (Northvale: Aronson, 1994) 139 . 2 Adapted from traditional sources by Doug Lipman, storyteller, consultant, and author. See www.hasidicstories.com and storytelling newsletter at www.storydynamics.com/etips. C. Harry Brooks, (M. Feldenkrais, trans .) Ha-autosugesti yah (Tel Aviv: Alef, 1977) (Originally published by Binah , Tel Aviv, 1929) 140. 4 Martin Buber, ed. (0. Marx, trans .), Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) 122 . 3

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Chapter 4 1648 The year 1648 was a watershed year throughout the Christian world. In that year the carnage known as the Thirty Years War, in which some 20,000 (mostly German) villages and towns were destroyed, drew to a close. Civil war was also raging in England; the following year Cromwell would settle a group of English Protestants in Northern Ireland to consolidate his power there . Meanwhile, in Boston, a woman was hanged for witchcraft. And, in the same year , Ukrainian Cossacks, under the leadership of Bogdan Chmielnitski , rebelled against Polish power in Ukraine. Many Jews had served as agents for Polish landowners, and resentment of Polish control was acted out on anyone connected with them. There was wholesale massacre of both Jews and Poles, along with a goodly number of Jesuit missionaries, who had tried to induce the Cossacks to leave the Orthodox church. Over ten years, while Tartars, Russians , and Swedes joined the fray against the Poles, hundreds of Jewish communities were totally destroyed in Ukraine and Poland. The Jewish dead were estimated at about 250,000 . There were, no doubt, many thousands of rapes . Poland's day as the "prom-ised land" was over. Chmielnitski would later show up as a hero in the narrative of anti-communist Ukrainian nationalists; the province in which Slavuta is now found is named after him. In Jewish history, until the advent of Hitler, Chmielnitski was the icon of horror. The trauma of the massacres over which he presided was so great that Jewish communal life was all but destro yed. The leadership was decimated, families were broken and dispersed, educational institutions-which until then had guaranteed a religious education even to the poorest-collapsed . The pressure on the survivors to convert to Christianity was strong. There was little comfort to be had, except perhaps the thought, held by some, that these tribulations were the "birth pangs of the Messiah." Coincidentally, in Asia Minor , a Turkish mystic named Shabbtai Tzvi was declared by his followers to be the Messiah himself. Good timing! - 43 -

The report of the Messiah's arrival could not have fallen on more sympathetic ears. Thousands of Jews, from many parts of Europe and around the Mediterranean, left their homes to follow him. His teachings-known as "Sabbatean" -seem quite wild (unless you happen to have been around in the 1960s). One Sabbatean speciality was the exaltation of the forbidden; that is, the idea that one can hasten redemption by sinning with the proper intention. Sexual taboos were turned on their heads, as Shabbtai Tzvi chose as his consort a woman of considerable reputation. It seems incredible, but, as wild as he was, the signs and the times and the level of desperation were such that the purported Messiah had the support, in writing, of many of Europe's great rabbis, who believed that the world was about to be utterly transformed. (Sound familiar?) Imagine their humiliation, their despair, when, at the point of the Sultan's sword, Shabbtai Tzvi converted to Islam. For some of the more fervent Sabbateans, this apostasy was a natural, if paradoxical step on the path to salvation; after all, what greater sin could there be than to convert? And, if done with the right intention, what a powerful gesture! For most of Shabbtai Tzvi's followers, however, it was a cruel and demoralizing turn of events. Following the Sabbatean episode, the surviving religious establishment became far more defensive and far more cautious, seeing the influence of Shabbtai Tzvi lurking behind all fresh ideas. In some cases, they were probably right, because the influence of the Sabbateans continued, surreptitiously, for some time. In any event, the whole tawdry and disruptive episode of the "false Messiah" revealed both the depth and the shadow of the Messianic longing that seems to hide at the centre of all of the major monotheistic faiths, and which is especially strong in times of great desperation. (Like our own, for example.) The episode also revealed hidden yearnings for more creativity, joy, and sensuality in life, for which there was no legitimate outlet. Enter the Hasidic revolution, in the person of a humble digger of clay.

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Chapter 5 The Adven t of Hasidism In the 1730s, as Jewish life was recovering from the massacres of Chmielnitski and the Sabbatean adventure, a new movement arose in Ukraine. It harnessed the yearning for redemption and the craving for joy, and it did so in a surprising and fresh way. It took the heart of Jewish mysticism, which had been the secret refuge of a spiritual elite, and gave it pride of place in the middle of daily life. Joy was married to piety, and redemp tion was placed wi thin the reach, and the responsibility, of each individual. Almost a century ago a scholar of Hasidism wrote: Before the advent of the BeShT [the founder of Hasidism], the Kabbalah concerned itself with things spiritually divine, with objects in the higher spheres . The Kabbalah of the BeShT, however, concerned itself with things materially divine, with objects in the lower strata. The Kabbalah before the BeShT found God above us; the Kabbalah of the BeShTfound God within and about us. 1 In the Hasidic dispensation, God shows up everywhere, with no exceptions; and the oneness of God shows up in every experience, if we will only show up to find it there. Erich Neumann was a student of Jung, and a pioneer of analytic psycho logy in Israel. In an early, unpublished paper, he considered the impact of Hasidism, with its mystical, unitary premises, on the Jewish psyche: In Hasidism everything is pregnant with revelation. There is no separation of sacred and profane. Habit is the evil enemy, which gets in the way of meeting the world anew in each moment . Hasidism brings us to a transaction which we could call the "actualization of Messianism." Namely, it brings us to a turning from the future to the present, from there to here, from outer to inner. It is a radical internalization of the problem of redemption. 2

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The Name of the Master of Names The man usually credited with launching this revolution was known as the Ba'al Shem Tov. The name literally means "Master of the Good Name." This title is usually shortened, after the Hebrew custom, by making an acronym of its initials. Thus Ba'al Shem Tov becomes B.Sh.T., which becomes BeShT. While it is awkward to the English ear to call someone by an acronym, there is no way around it. That's his name, the BeShT. If it helps, think of NATO. The term ba'al shem, or "master of names," belongs to the rare but ageless profession of wonder workers. To borrow the title of Jerome Rothenberg's classic anthology of shamanic poetry, such people are "Technicians of the Sacred." In the Jewish context, the "technologies" of a ba'al shem would include using divine names for magical or healing purposes. The appropriate name, and there are lots of them, was either pronounced or written in the form of an amulet. Among the Jews of both Western and Eastern Europe, these "name masters" most probably shared a common fund of herbal and magical knowledge (spells, exorcisms, amulets, potions, etc.) with non-Jewish healers. They were consulted by non-Jews and Jews alike . The BeShT, whose given name was Israel ben (son of) Eliezer, was born in the Ukrainian village of Okopy circa 1700 and died in the town of Medzhybozh in 1760. Tradition says that he was recognized as a spiritual teacher after living for some sixteen years in the Carpathian Mountains. There he helped to support himself and his wife by digging clay, which she then sold in the marketplace. He devoted himself to spiritual exercises, and received mystical instruction from an "ascended master." The early testimonies of his healings and wondrous adventures suggest that the BeShT earne d his title . In these stories he appears as a folk hero-a magician, healer, community leader and shaman, capable of interceding in both higher and lower worlds on behalf of individual petitioners and the community at large. 3 At the core of his teaching was the notion that everyone in the community, and not just the well-schooled and the wellheeled, had access to the divine presence. Since educational - 46 -

standards had collapsed in the wake of the troubles of 1648, this was a notion whose time had come . Moreover , there was also a hint in his teachings that the simple and uneducated might actually possess certain spiritual advantages over the learned. The simple person might be capable of a more direct and uncluttered passion , and the BeShT taught that passion gets you closer to the divine presence than mere knowledge. Whether scholar or wagon driver , innkeeper or woodcutter, if one's intentions were aligned, one's heart pure, one's devotion sincere, one's enthusiasm great, one could unify oneself with God in any action. The Divine is accessible to anyone who seeks It anywhere, in the forest and the marketplace, the tavern and the marriage bed, in song, dance, in simple brotherhood. God 's love is not so hidden after all; it is right there in the love of your fellow humans . These were sweet and forgiving messages in a milieu in which dreadful occurrences were often seen as divine punishment for personal and communal failings. Part of his message, more simply put, was "Don't be so hard on yourselves!" Yes, fulfill the commandments, but don 't make yourself depressed while you do so. This is not the service of God; in fact, it is the victory of what holds us back. Better to do as King David recommended and "Serve God with joy ."4 The BeShT taught: "If one wishes his prayers to bear fruit, he must offer them with pleasure and joy." 5 Here again: the inner state matters as much as the outer gesture. Here is a classic story of th e BeShT that illustrates the point: It was Yorn Kippur , the holi est day in th e calend ar, and an illiterate shepherd boy walked into th e synagogue . The pra yer was at its most intens e. The boy did not know the pra yers, but his heart was swept up in the en ergy and he did what he knew best: he whistled. The other worshipper s were shocked, and tried to stop him. It was then that the BeShT spoke to the congregation: "Let the boy whistle . Before he began , our prayers were stalled, and could not open the gates of Heaven . But when he started to whistle, with such a pure intention , the gates opened wide , and all of our pra yers were able to enter. " - 47 -

Tzaddik, Rebbe, Hasid, and Sacred Community Another place that the BeShT and his companions really made their mark in Jewish history was in the institution of the Tzaddik (literally, saintly or righteous one). The Tzaddik is friend, teacher, leader, healer, shaman, intercessor, advocate, advisor, counsellor-centre pole of a sacred community. He does not get to run away and do all this stuff in a cave; and if he does, he is not a Tzaddik. As Gershom Scholem , pre-eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, wrote, the Tzaddik lived ... the ancient paradox of solitude and communion . He who has attained the highest degree of spiritual solitude, who is capable of being alone with God, is the true centre of the community ... To live among ordinary men and yet be alone with God , to speak profane language and yet draw strength to live from the source of existence . . . that is a paradox which only the mystical devotee is able to realize in his life and which makes him the centre of the community of men. 6

Tzaddik is a formal term, and generally one does not use it for a living teacher. When one speaks of the centre pole of one's actual community, the word is Rebbe. As Rabbi and Professor Zalman Schachter-Shalomi writes, in his recent book on Hasidism, the words Rebbe and Hasid are relationship words, like mother and daughter. There is no Hasid without a Rebbe, and there is no Rebbe without a Hasid, and there is neither of them without a community. 7 And if it ever were to come to pass that things were as disordered as that, said a Tzaddik named Simchah Bunam, then it is a sign of the end of days: Before the Messiah will come, there will be Rabbis without Torah, Hasidim without Hasidism , rich men without riches , summers without heat, winters without cold, and grainstalks without grain. 8

In the next chapters we will meet a couple of Moshe's own ancestral Tzaddiks, and in chapter 17 a contemporary Rebbe, who , at the age of ninety, became a Feldenkrais student . - 48 -

Opposition and Victory The rapid growth of the Hasidic movement was something of a challenge to the authorities of the traditional path. They were horrified by what they saw as indecorous behaviour, such as turning somersaults and shouting during prayer, and they were very uncomfortable with the open promulgation of mystical teaching. Moreover, they were especially nervous that the study of Talmud might not be given its due with all this joyful, mystical leaping and dancing going on . The charismatic quality of early Hasidism was particularly offensive to the famous chief Rabbi of the city of Vilna, Lithuania . (In Jewish folklore and folk history, the very word Litvak (i.e., Lithuanian), suggests a drier, more logical and dispassionate character.) The Vilna gaon, or sage (1720-1797), denounced the Hasidim as heretics and demanded that they be shunned and, more shockingly, that their books be burned. In some places, this actually happened . Though it provoked much ill will and suffering, the opposition of the Vilna gaon and his allies was ultimately of no avail against the teaching of the BeShT and his successors. The people were looking for sweetness, forgiveness, and community, and the intellectual bullying of distant authorities was, not surprisingly, ineffective. After the passing of the Ba'al Shem Tov, his teaching continued to spread. By the start of the 19th century, Hasidism had won the battle . In a few generations it had transformed itself into the religious style of most of the Jewish population in the area we now know as Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. (Lithuania was a holdout.) With time, even the religious establishment, which had initially sensed in Hasidism traces of the Sabbatean heresy, accepted the legitimacy of the movement.

Evolution and Adaptation As with all successful revolutions, the Hasidic movement experienced feuds over dynastic succession, accusations of corruption, and other trials of power. Some of the charges against it were true, while others were whipped up by its opponents. Meanwhile, pogroms, galloping secularization , industrialization, political upheaval and mass emigration eroded its population base in rural Eastern Europe . In the 20th century, more pogroms, the chaos and disruption of the First - 49 -

World War, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and SS death squads all but obliterated Hasidism in the land of its birth. Nonetheless, Hasidic society has shown a rather amazing capacity for adaptation, recovery and survival around the globe, while Tsarist despotism, Bolshevism, and Nazism have proven far more brittle. And today, against all odds, the movement has returned to Ukraine.

Hasidism today As the 21st century gathers momentum, there are probably somewhere over a half a million Hasidic Jews in the world. About half of them live in Israel, and the rest in the U.S., England, Canada, Belgium, Australia, etc. From whichever perspective you choose to view it, the Hasidic world has staged a spectacular demographic comeback, with a concomitant growth in influence on the Israeli scene, in the Jewish world, and in the world at large.* Author Robert Eisenberg toured through contemporary Hasidic communities worldwide, and from his travels came a book called Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground. Eisenberg describes his meeting with Solomon Halberstam, spiritual guide of many thousands of Bobover Hasidim (that is, a group once centred in the town of Bobov), and mentions that his grandfather used to be a Bobover, back in pre-war Poland. "Yes, yes, I remember," says the Rabbi, "There were five brothers. Baruch, Mortke, Herschel, Leibl, and Yankel." This, from a counsellor for thousands, at a distance of at least fifty years, and after many heartbreaking losses and just as many mad dashes for freedom . One of the Rabbi Halberstam's followers, a "convert" from the modern world, says to Eisenberg as he is leaving the interview: His wife and children were killed in the war. It's amazing he gets up in the morning. But what keeps him going is what no drug, no therapy, no amount of money can do. It's faith. And whether you believe it or not , you've got to admit it's a powerful thing. 9

Owing to their dress, their voluntary isolation, and a frequently arch-conservative stance on political and gender issues, contemporary Hasidim often appear atavistic to outside observers, and many of them like it that way. For outsiders, it

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is a challenge to reconcile these impressions with what they have heard of the boldness and freshness of the early Hasidic teachers, such as the BeShT. Let us take on that challenge and dig a bit toward the roots; as you will see, the digging is worth the effort.* As a start, let us look at the life of one of the most prominent of the early Hasidic teachers, Dr. Feldenkrais' distant ancestor and namesake, in the next chapter. A light to his generation, this man would join no movement, start no dynasty, and said that he preferred death to dishonesty.

'M . Teitelbaum, cited in Newman, Louis I. Newman, ed., Maggidim and Hasidim: Their Wisdom (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1962) 95. 2

From notes written in 1952 by Dr. Gustave Dreifuss, from an unpublished manuscript written by Dr. Erich Neumann in the 1930s , with the title:

Beitrage zur Tiefenpsychologie des jiidischen Menschen und zum Problem der Offenbarung. (D.K. translation from the German). 3 For the wonder tales of the BeShT, see Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz, trans. and eds., In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Shivhei ha-Besht ) (New York: Schocken Books) 1984. For folklore of the supernatural in the Hasidic world, see Gedalyah Nigal, Magic , Mysticism, and Hasidism (Northvale: Aronson, 1994) 4 Psalms 100:2. 5 Louis I. Newman, ed. The Hasidic Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1963) 203. 6 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1995) 343. 7 Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Wrapped in a Hol y Flame: Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters (San Fran cisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003) 12. 8 Newman, 253. 9 Robert Eisenberg, Boychiks in the Hood : Travels in the Hasidic Underground (New York: Harper Collins, 1995) 41.

* In Israel, where traditionalist prote sters have taken to th e streets to impose their values on less observant fellow citizens-gender segregation on public transport , for example-the relationship between ultra-orthodox and secular can get a little sour, and loaded with projections in both directions. And then there is the demonstrative involvement of some Hasidic groups with nationalist ideologies-both for and against. For our purposes, it is helpful to differentiate between between the founders of Hasidism in the 18th century (among them, Moshe's ancestors), and later developments, especially from the mid-19th century to the present day. If we look at the history of Chasidism (sic) we have two different movements. Chasidism in the 18th century has nothing to do with contemporary Chasidism. The contemporary Chasidic movement is a - 51 -

product of the 19th century, not the age of the Ba'a/ Shem Tov. Because the Ba'al Shem Tov neverplanned for it to be a mass movement, only for certain elite circles. - Interview with Israeli historian of Hasidism , Prof. David Assaf http: // www. un pious .com/2012 /05 /in terview-with-professor-da vid-assa f/

The founders were not looking to become a political force. They saw themselves as working within a small leadership class to influence the moral and spiritual development of their people. In any case, they were living under an absolute monarchy, in which political agitation was banned and they had no access to power. In Israel, political freedom (not to mention a political system where small parties can exercise a huge influence) has altered the playing field, introducing previously unimaginable temptations.

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Chapter 6 Pinchas of Koretz If a Feldenkrais practitioner has heard one Hasidic name, it is likely to be that of Pinchas of Koretz. Feldenkrais's middle name was Pinchas, and he spoke of his namesake often, with great pride and reverence, going so far as to quote Pinchas during his lectures. In this chapter, following up on the clues that Feldenkrais himself left, we will tune into the life and teachings of Pinchas of Koretz, and see what they have to tell us about his big fan and distant descendant. As the Ba'al Shem Tov, the BeShT, lay on his deathbed (1760), his studen ts gathered around him. One of them asked: "How can you leave us all alone?" The BeShT answered: "The bear is in the woods and Pinchas is a Holy Man." By the bear he meant Rabbi Dov Ber, whom the BeShT had chosen as his successor. By Pinchas, he meant the young sage Pinchas ben Abraham Abba Shapiro-later to become known as Pinchas of Koretz. The Czech author Jiri Langer recounts the following story: One day Pinchas fell seriously ill. This was durin g the lifetime of the holy Ba'al Shem and he was still very young. Apparently the only way Pinchas could be saved was by bleeding. The holy Ba'al Shem warned the surgeon: "Make sure you cut him in the right place, and see that the lad doesn 't lose a single drop of blood more than he needs to enable him to recover. If you are not quite sure about it, then give it up altogether! I would rather place my hand on his, and have my own arm cut, than allow a single drop of his blood to be wasted . That boy's blood is immensely dear to me . It is a wondrous fluid, which was created at the very beginning of the world." 1

Pinchas's People Pinchas Shapiro was born circa 1728 into a poor but eminent rabbinical family. Very eminent indeed: it is possible to trace his Shapiro ancestors thirteen generations back to the Rhineland town of Speyer in the 15th century, and they are - 53 -

only traceable because so many of them left their mark as religious leaders or authors. He was born in Shklov, in the province of Mogilev-then Poland, today Belarus. Sitting near the borders of the feuding kingdoms of Russia, Poland and Sweden, Shklov probably wished it were somewhere else. In 1655, the Cossacks pillaged the town. In 1708, it was the Swedes. In 1812, it was the army of Napoleon . As they say in real estate, location is everything. It was a rough neighbourhood , not only on account of the recurrent invasions, but also because the blood libel (according to which Jews were accused of using the blood of Christian children to make Passover matzos) was rife in the region. Like witch-burning, cross-burning , the Inquisition, McCarthyism, and other such curious habits, the blood libel, still alive and well during the childhood of Moshe Feldenkrais, was used by anti-Semitic authorities to incite mob violence against the Jewish community. Or, like the witchcraft trials of New England , it could be used more precisely, to ruin the lives of individuals who rubbed you the wrong way . Pinchas's grandfather did not endear himself to the local church authorities by making it his mission to reconvert Jews who had been baptized in the aftermath of the massacres. Perhaps vengeance was in the air when someone accused Pinchas's father, Rabbi Abraham Abba Shapiro, of using Christian blood in his baking. 2 Whatever the motive behind this accusation, Abraham Abba had to flee for his life with his family . He eventually settled in the village of Miropol, to the east of Slavuta .

The "Conversion" Abraham Abba's son Pinchas was possessed of a broad and deep curiosity. Unlike many young men of his time and place, he studied mathematics, grammar and geometry. He was raised in the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition, but he yearned for something more heartful; this he found in the Kabbalah and in medieval texts of musar , or moral self-examination. The legends say he was exceedingly devout, and his practice was severe : stringent fasting, self-mortification, and other forms of asceticism. When rumours of the BeShT reached Pinchas, he began to feel the pull, but his very strict father would not allow him to go with it. - 54 -

Nevertheless, sometime in the late 1750s both of them heard the BeShT teach, the father's resistance crumbled, and Pinchas was enraptured. He was never the same. "From the day that I was with the BeShT, he said, "God helped me toward the truth." 3 Though Pinchas visited with the BeShT only three times, the influence was very deep, and it flowed both ways. As the story of Pinchas's illness above shows, the BeShT saw a particularly bright light in this young man, and despite the difference in their ages, they were more like soul-mates than master and disciple. Pinchas remained an intense character, but his former harshness and aloofness was replaced by a shy sweetness. For a long time he hid himself away, not wanting to be drawn away from study and prayer. Nevertheless, somehow or other the word got out that he was possessed of a healing wisdom, and he started to draw a following. Later on , as a well-known sage and healer, he remarked that he was much closer to the Torah during the days when he was studying behind the stove. The strain between innerness and the need to "show up" for others never left him . This struggle of his is part of his legend. Here is his prayer for obscurity, in the words of novelist and essayist Elie Wiesel: 11

"Master of the Universe, forgive my audacity. I know I should thank You for the gifts You have bestowed on me , thank You for making me so liked by Your children. But do understand, please, that I have no time left for You. Do something , anything. Make people like me less ... " His wish was granted . People stopped visiting him at home, no longer greeted him on the street. And he was happ y. But then came the Succoth holiday . As was the custom, he recited the Ushpizin prayer with true fervour ... [This is a prayer that invites the biblical patriarchs to be one's guests .] The first one to appear was Abraham; he stood at the entrance but refused to step inside , explaining: " If nobod y comes to you, I must stay away, too . A Jew must live with his people, not only for his people." Next day Rebbe Pinhas addressed another plea to God . And people sought him out once more. 4

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Clearly, this was not someone who advertised for students. It seems they just arrived; he was a Tzaddik in spite of himself. Here is what Pinchas had to say about marketing: "From the time that I began to serve the Creator, I have not chased after anything, but [received] only what God Himself has provided. "5 He even turned away some of those who did show up, if he did not immediately feel a connection with them. By the standards of modern western culture Pinchas was an unlikely hero, even an anti-hero. But then again, his was a culture that especially valued the quality of inwardness, and Pinchas, at least as he was remembered by his students and neighbours, embodied this quality to a high degree. The Montreal Yiddish poet, I. I. Segal (1896-1954), who was raised in Koretz, conveys something of the thoroughgoing humility for which Pinchas was known, in a poem published in 1950, one hundred and sixty years after the death of its subject. Here is a portion of that poem, entitled Reb Pinchas/: "I have taught all of you The alphabet, cantillation and the Five Books of Moses, Now I just want to sit with you in fellowship, Under the Torah pointer of the Creator of the World. We are all his students, Are we not all his Hasidim?" They stand with their eyes on the ground , in fearful silence. While dear little Pinchas shines all the brighter, The simplest of all Rabbis, The most Jewish of all Jews, If one is permitted to say such a thing. 6

What Professor Scholem said about the qualities of a Tzaddik, cited in the previous chapter, could serve as Pinchas's resume: "He who has attained the highest degree of spiritual solitude, who is capable of being alone with God, is the true centre of the community." In this sense, Pinchas embodied a certain archetype of Jewish manhood, questing with every ounce of his being while fulfilling responsibilities as a spiritual anchor. The way the Hasidic movement developed after the passing of the BeShT did not please Pinchas. He was a little closer to the Lithuanian tradition than most Hasidim, and was of the opinion that the subtler teachings of Hasidism should not - 56 -

be shared with just anyone. On the other hand, the BeShT's chosen successor, Rabbi Dov Ber, held that the teachings, like seeds, should be scattered everywhere . If they took root, so much the better. As it turned out, under the leadership of Rabbi Dov Ber, the movement enjoyed phenomenal growth throughout the region and beyond. Whether Pinchas regarded quantitative success as a good thing is another matter. Pinchas also disagreed with (what was to become) the Hasidic mainstream over the priority given to achieving higher states of consciousness, as opposed to the purification of one's character. The mainstream, as it later became crystallized in the lineage of the Dov Ber, was more inclined toward expanding consciousness, and letting the rough edges of one's character sort themselves out . Pinchas, here again a little closer to the Lithuanian school, emphasized the purification of character, through faith, truthfulness, and humility. He walked his talk, with ruthless self-inquiry. "I have found nothing more difficult than to overcome lying . It took me fourteen years. I broke every bone I had, and at last I found a way out ." 7 One can see how a man so devoted to self-development might have been skeptical of any mass movement, and especially a mystical mass movement. One can also see why the masses would not have followed him: his was the Road Less Travelled. His attitude to these differences was characteristic: he would not make them into a controversy. He said of Dov Ber, "If he were to follow my path, and I were to follow his, we would both burn up." 8 For his piety, his honesty, his humility, his path in prayer , his healings and remedies, his wisdom and his intelligence , for his radical non-dualism, Pinchas commanded enormous respect. A visitor , Rabbi Isaiah of Dinovitz, said of him: "What we so-called good Jews comprehend after six months of mental torment, Rabbi Pinchas grasps in one leap. "9 While much has come down to us of Pinchas's teachings (see next chapter), we know very little about his family life. We know that he was married twice, first to Treyna, mother of sons Meir and Moshe, and, on Treyna's death, to Yutta, mother of daughter Rukhl (Reyzl) Sheyndl Sore and sons Ya'akov and Yechezkiel. All the sons became rabbis, and the daughter, - 57 -

who was named after Pinchas's own mother, married a rabbi. We will hear more about a couple of Pinchas's children in chapter 7, where we look into the question of Moshe Feldenkrais's ancestry . After teaching in Koretz for some twenty years, Pinchas packed up and moved to Ostrog, to be closer to his colleagues. Then, in his mid-sixties, he resolved to make the journey to the Holy Land, then part of the Ottoman Empire, to join fellow Kabbalists in the ancient hill-top town of Safed. This was not to be . He got only as far as the town of Shepetovka (a.k.a. Shpitovka, Spitovka), where he took sick. He died there on the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Elul, in the year 5551 (1791), and there he was buried. On the same day [Pinchas's student] Rabbi Jacob Samson of Spitovka, who already resided in the Holy Land, saw a vision: The Shechinah appeared to him in the form of a woman in lamentation; he perceived that her lamentation was for a friend of her youth who had died. Thereupon he awoke and cried with grief: "Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz has died!" He was asked how he knew this. "Outside of him, " he replied , "there exists in this day no Tzaddik for whom the Shechinah would lament. " He stood up, made the rent in his garment according to tradition as a sign of his grief, and spoke the blessing of God's righteousness. For many days he mourned his passing. After a long time the news came to the Holy Land: Rabbi Pinchas is no more. 10

In recent years, a group of Israeli Hasidim who are devoted to his memory have found Pinchas's resting place in Shepetovka, bought the little field in which it is located, and built a small mausoleum over the grave, along with a visitor's centre . 1

Jiri Langer, Nine Gates to the Chassidic Mysteries (Northvale: Aronson, 1993) 199. 2 As late as 1913, when Feldenkrais was nine years old, there was a notorious blood libel in Kiev, resulting in th e murder trial of one Menachem Beillis. The citizens of Baranovichi, where Moshe was living, followed the trial closely, because they knew that a conviction would result in pogroms throughout the Empire. See Rubin Kaplan, My Memoirs: From Palonkeh and Baranovichi, Belarus, 1904 to 1922, http ://www. jewishgen.org/yizkor/ Baranovichi/baranovichi.html. - 58 -

3

Abraham Joshua Hesch el, The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov: Studies in Hasidism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 11.

4

Elie Wiesel, Somewhere a Master: Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends ( ew York: Summit Books, 1982) 20-21. 5 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, (Elimelech Eliezer Frankel, ed.), Imre Pinchas ha-shalem (2nd ed.) (B'nei Brak: Yechezkiel Sharga Frankel, 2003) 465. 6 1. I. Segal, Sefer yidish (Montreal, 1950). (D.K., trans.) Used by permission of the family. 7 Martin Buber, ed ., (0. Marx , trans .), Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) 131. Please do not take this statement literally. See chapter 15. 8 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, 456. 9 Heschel, pp. 31-32. 10 Louis I. Newman , ed ., The Hasidic Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1963) 71.

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Chapter 7 Healings and Teachings of Pinchas of Koretz Like the BeShT before him, Pinchas had a reputation for miraculous healings. Did he have a method? If so, what was it? One part was radical and non-dualistic faith. He would advise his petitioners to let go of all exterior supports and give themselves entirely over to trust: "A person must believe that even the way a piece of straw lies on the ground-this way or that-is according to the decree of God." 1 In line with this principle, he discouraged people from using herbal remedies, amulets, and witchcraft, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. A man once brought his sick daughter to Rabbi Pinchas, after they had exhausted their supernatural options . He got angry and said, "First you go to witches and amulet makers, and then you come to me!?" He told them to take off all the amulets, then come back. Another time, a student came to him wearing an amulet. Pinchas said: "God has helped me to overcome all these amulet makers, and you are coming to me ... so get rid of the amulet!" The student answered : "Then what should I do about the thing for which I am wearing the amulet?" Pinchas replied, "Think about me and don't be afraid." In another case, he said to a sick visitor: "Look at me when I say the word bless" -and the person was healed . Sometimes he would say nothing, but just stand close by, and the patient was cured. Another part was a keen sense of observation. Contemporary testimonies suggest he was unusually well-informed about the ways of nature, both human and elemental. To him these were self-evident and natural phenomena . Seeing no separation between observed phenomena and their correlates in the non-manifest worlds, he was, like the BeShT, somehow able to tune into and work with the spiritual root of a physical manifestation. Thus, it was not apparent to people standing around what exactly Pinchas was up to: was this a miracle of faith, or the work of a brilliant mind? Since Pinchas contained in himself a remarkable combination of rational understanding and extraordinary trust in the connectedness of everything to the - 61 -

Divine, one suspects it was both. Once, when Pinchas had come up with yet another cure out of nowhere, a companion asked him where it had come from. Was it a holy inspiration? And Pinchas said, pointing at a noisy rooster nearby: "No, it wasn't a holy inspiration: I got it from this rooster."

Teachings: A Torah of the Whole World Pinchas was known for the breadth of subject matter that found its way into his teaching: Torah, prayer, meticulous observance, for sure, but also weather, sun and moon, animal life, sexual positions, the stages of human development, song and dance, food and remedies, politics and buildings. In this he was exceptional among the Hasidic masters of his time; he even went so far as to recommend secular studies to his students. His Torah included the whole world, and vice versa: "Whoever says that Torah is one thing and the world is another, he is an unbeliever. 112 The testimony of his peers reveals Pinchas's rare alignment of intellect and spirituality. Rabbi Leyb, son of Sarah, called him "the brain of the world," while Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk called him "the heart of the world." Perhaps the most intriguing description comes from Rabbi Ze'ev of Zhitomir: "The holy words of Rabbi Pinchas come from the hidden root of knowledge, from a part of the brain yet to be discovered ." Feldenkrais said on a number of occasions that Pinchas was the "St. Paul of Hasidism. "3 By this he was referring to the understanding that it was St. Paul who put Christianity on the map, through his preaching and his writings, since Jesus wrote no books. Similarly, Moshe taught, the BeShT wrote nothing down, and it was Pinchas, through his writings, who put Hasidism on the map. This is one of those cases where Moshe proves himself, as a historian, to have been an excellent physicist. In fact, the ever-humble Pinchas wrote no books at all and we have only a few letters in his handwriting. Some of his teachings were written down by his students, and later, sometimes much later, collected, edited and printed . One manuscript collection emerged in tragic and dramatic fashion from the ashes of wartime Poland. When it became clear to him that neither he, nor his family, nor his communi- 62 -

ty would survive the liquidation of the ghetto of Tarnov, Rabbi Pinchas Chodorov placed a packet of documents in the hands of a non-Jewish friend. Seven years after the war, the friend delivered the manuscripts to a Jewish organization, and the contents were printed quite recently in the collection known as Imre Pinchas. Here, culled from a variety of sources, is a Feldenkrais practitioner's selection of aphorisms and anecdotes of Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz. [Where the quote is from a primary source in Hebr ew or Yiddish, the translation is my own, sometimes with the assistance of a helpful scholar. Where the quote is from a secondary source, say, for example Newman or Wiesel, the translation is the work of the editor cited . In the case of Martin Buber's collections, the citations are from the English version by Olga Marx. In some cases I have paraphrased a previous translation , as indicated.] LOVE AND DIFFICULTIES:

"If a man, God forbid, has troubles, and he receives those troubles with love, he would surely be free of them ... Because when they are received with love, the Shechinah arises, and this frees him . And this is so even if he doesn't think about it, and it is not in his intentions at the time, if he receives his troubles with love." 4 AWARENESS AND MOVEMENT:

"Sometimes I observe one prayer for eight days, and I watch myself each day in every single movement, even when I turn my face from side to side. 115 "When I am praying before the ark and I bend myself to the right side, other worlds are harnessed to that movement, and when I bend to the other side, likewise. Thus a man must pay heed to every movement. 116 "When a man makes such and such a motion with his hand, thus it is done in all the worlds, and when he makes another motion with his hand, so it is done in all the worlds ... If we were able to see really deeply into a man , we would see that on every vein and fibre depend countless worlds. "7 - 63 -

"It is possible to recognize an insane man by observing whether his clothes fit him as if they truly belonged to him. The normal man's garments accommodate themselves to the normal movements of his muscles and limbs. 118

Explaining the Kabbalistic principles of "direct light" (expansion) and "reflected light" (contraction), Pinchas taught: "If you drop your hand, this is according to the principle of expansion . If you lift your hand, this is according to the principle of contraction. "9 WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS:

"Man contains within himself all the worlds that exist; he is, therefore, able to have contact with them all. Man possesses within himself all good and all evil traits, but they are in an unborn state; it is within his power to give them birth. 1110 "What is God? The totality of souls. Whatever exists in the whole can also be found in the part. So, in any one soul, all souls are contained. If I turn, in 't'shuvah' [i.e., if I turn myself toward this totality and away from my separateness] I contain in me the friend whom I wish to help, and he contains me in him. My 't'shuvah' makes the him-in-me better and the mein-him better. This way it becomes so much easier for the him-in-him to become better. 1111 "He who truly loves another whether good or evil. 1112

can read his thoughts,

LISTENING:

'"When a man conducts himself properly, he can see with an eye that is not an eye, and hear with an ear that is not an ear.' [Citing The Duties of the Heart, by Bahya lbn Paquda] . Therefore, when anyone comes to ask for counsel, I hear how he himself tells me how to answer." 13 PRAYER:

"The prayer a man says, the prayer, in itself, is Divinity. It is not as if you were asking something of a friend, as if he were one thing and your request was something else. But it is not so in prayer, for prayer unites the upper levels. When a man who is praying thinks his prayer is a thing apart from - 64 -

God, he is like a slave to whom the king gives what he has begged from him. But he who knows that prayer in itself is Divinity, is like the king's son who takes what he needs from the stores of his father." 14 BOOZE AND THE BRAIN:

"The Talmud declares that wine taken in moderation unfolds the brain of a man. He who is a total abstainer is rarely possessed of wisdom." 15 FELLOWSHIP:

"When a man is singing and cannot lift his voice, and another comes and sings with him, another who can lift his voice, the first will be able to lift his voice too . That is the secret of the bond between spirits. 1116 ON THE EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG:

"In the same way that a little child cannot digest meat and must subsist on milk, a youth cannot understand Kabbalah and should study other subjects. Mysticism is indigestible food for a young man. 1117 IMPROVEMENT:

"He whose mind is occupied with thoughts of impro vement for himself and his dependants has only good thoughts. 1118 SLEEP: "If a person is beset by worrie s, his wisest course is to go to sleep. In sleep his soul merges with the Infinite in which all care dissolves into nothing." 19

"Each thing sleeps in its own way. Vegetation and water also sleep. There are times when the angels of the Lord sleep, too , in their own way, and even the Law of God is wont to sleep. 1120 SADNESS, PRIDE AND HUMILITY:

"Sadness and bitterness are the result of pride. The proud man who suffers tribulations cannot understand how a person of his quality merits tribulations . But the humble man accepts whatever betides with calmness and philosophic resignation. 112 1

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HONESTY:

"It is better for a man that his soul should depart from him than that he should utter a lie." 22 EVOLUTION:

"Among all creatures there are some types that are transitional. There are those that are transitional between plant and animal, and there are plants that are transitional between grasses and trees. Monkeys are transitional between animals and man." 23 (Note: Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was published in 185 9. Pinchas died in 1790 or 1791.) ETHICAL ECOLOGY:

"Man was created last [in the account in Genesis] for the following reason: if he is deserving, he shall find all nature at his service; if he is undeserving, he shall find all nature arrayed against him . "24 HUMOUR AND PARADOX IN TEACHING:

"The Satan [literally, "the opponent"] is inconsistent. He persuades a man not to go to synagogue on a cold morning; yet when the man does go, he follows him into it." 25 "If someone finds it necessary to honour me , that means

he is more humble than me . Which means he is better and saintlier than me. Which means that I should honour him. But then, why is he honouring me?" 26 "The man who thinks himself pure reveals a sign of impurity." 27 "Good is only the reverse of evil, and pleasure is merely the opposite of anxiety." 28 "If men did not sin, the Lord would have no occasion to employ His attributes of mercy, compassion, and the like, but only His attributes [sic] of justice. Therefore, it follows that even sinners please the Lord : they bring into play His worthiest attributes. "29

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KINDNESS:

"Between a Hasid and a clever man, the Hasid is superior. Between a clever Hasid and a kind man, the kind man is superior. 1130 HIDING:

"Rabbi Rafael of Bershad, the favourite disciple of Rabbi Pinchas, told: 'On the first day of Chanukah, I complained to my teacher that in adversity it is very difficult to retain perfect faith in th e belief that God provides for every human being. It actually seems as if God were hiding his face from such an unhappy being . What shall he do to strengthen his faith?' Pinchas replied: 'It ceases to be hiding, if you know it is hiding.' 113 1 MUSIC:

"In a town where there are musicians (song-makers), there is fresh thinking. 1132

1 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, (Elimelech Eliezer Frankel, ed.), Imre Pinchas ha-shalem (2nd ed.) (B'nei Brak: Yechezkiel Sharga Frankel, 2003) 464. 2

Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, 463 . Moshe Feldenkrais, Autobiographical Video (Portland: International Feldenkrais Federation, 1981 ). 4 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, Midrash Pinchas ha-shalem (Ashdod : Yishlim, 2001) VII:169:20. 5 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, 1:10. 6 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, 1:10. 7 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, I:10. 8 Louis I. Newman , ed., The Hasidic Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1963) 122:4. 9 Martin Buber, ed ., (0. Marx, trans .), Tales of the Hasidim : The Early Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) 122 (D.K. paraphrase). 10 Newman, 230 . 11 Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Wrapped in a Hol y Flame: Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003) 49. 12 Newman, 506 . 13 Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi , Spiritual Intimac y: A Study of Counseling in Hasidism (Northvale : Aronson, 1991) 233 . 14 Buber, 125 (D.K. paraphrase ). 3

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15

Newman, 85:5. Buber, 126. 17 Newman, 527. 18 Newman, 508. 19 JiriLanger, Nine Gates to the Chassidic Mysteries (Northvale: Aronson, 1993) 215. 20 Langer, 215. 21 Newman, 486. 22 Newman, 506. 23 Langer, 219. 24 Newman, 230. 25 Newman, 505 26 Elie Wiesel, Somewhere a Master : Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends (New York: Summit Books, 1982) 17 (D.K. paraphrase). 27 Langer, 215. 28 Newman, 97:6. 29 Newman, 445. 30 Newman, 505. 31 Buber, 122 (D.K. paraphrase). 32 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, (Elimelech Eliezer Frankel, ed.), Imre Pinchas ha-shalem (2nd ed.) (B'nei Brak: Yechezkiel Sharga Frankel, 2003) 186. 16

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Chapter 8 Slavuta Feldenkrais was, to the best of our knowledge , born in Slavuta, Ukraine, a town with great importance in Hasidic history, and, of course, in Feldenkrais history. And so, our story takes us to a place a little south of Koretz, a little west of Shepetovka, and a little east of Ostrog. By today 's standards , these towns are right on top of one another, but in a horsedrawn, muddy-road world in an era of despotism and banditry, they were not so close. Back in the late 18th century , Pinchas 's second son , Moshe Shapiro, showed a talent for penmanship. In the days before typing , stenography, photocopying, faxing, word processing, e-mail, text-messaging, and PDAs, this was a very useful talent; it was the way teachings were spread. Pincha s encouraged him, and this talent led him to the art of printing. The young Moshe Shapiro established a printing house in Slavuta, and the press , the books it published, and the scandals that surrounded it put this little town on the Hasidic map to stay . The "Slovita" press, for so it was known among Jews, eventually fed several generations of Shapiros. It turned out complete sets of the Talmud as well as a small number of Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts. These imprints are still revered for their beauty and quality, and for the thoroughness and respect that went into the editing and typesetting. It is said that Moshe Shapiro actually used silver instead of lead for his type. A set of Slovita Talmud is today worth thousands and thousands of dollars. In 1796, Moshe Shapiro published a book by his friend Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi. This book, known as Tanya, became the core text of the Chabad lineage of Hasidism. On the following page you will find the title page of Tan ya. In big letters, about two-thirds of the way down the page , is the word SLOVITA. The name of owner of the press does not appear on the title page, because he did not yet have government permission to open a printing house! Sometime in the early 1800s, two of Moshe Shapiro 's sons, Pinchas and Shmuel Abba Shapiro, joined him in the printing - 69 -

business. The local Tsarist authorities, who made no secret of their anti-Semitism, had always been suspicious of what the Hasidim were up to. Clearly, something was going on that they didn't understand. Moreover, they were especially suspicious of the Hasidic publishing houses. They saw them as possible dens of sedition, especially, one might surmise, because the authorities could not read Hebrew books. (As recent experience will confirm, if it is your job is to be suspicious, it is especially easy to imagine sedition in books written with funny letters that go the wrong way across the page.)

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Title page of the first Slovita edition of Tanya.

The authorities were encouraged in their suspicions by anti-Hasidic traditionalists, known as misnagdim (literally, "opponents"), who accused the Hasidim of spreading the worst sort of heresies . To complicate the situation, there was a new and growing group of rationalist Jews, known as maskilim, who sought to bring the Jews of the Pale into the modern world by freeing them of their traditional ways. These folks were also whispering in the Tsar's ear, so to speak. So, you had three groups of anti-Hasidim: the Tsar's people, who - 70 -

could not read the books, and didn't like them; the misnagdim, who could read the books but didn't like them because they were too revolutionary; and the maskilim, who could read the books and didn't like them because they were too traditional. Trouble was brewing in Slavuta. And when, in 1835, one of the employees in the print shop, known for his depressive moods, committed suicide by hanging himself in the synagogue, the dreck hit the fan, so to speak. The Shapiro brothers were denounced to the authorities as murderers, and the story that the Hasidim tell is that it was their traditionalist opponents who were behind the denunciation. What followed was a Kafkaesque saga of framing, imprisonment, brutal torture and exile. In the course of this horror, in 1837, Moshe Shapiro, son of Pinchas, father of the brothers Shapiro and accused along with them of sedition, fell ill and died at the age of seventy-eight. Meanwhile the anti-Semites and the misnagdim and the maskilim all got their way: the Slavuta press was shut down. 1 The brothers Shapiro were sentenced to internment in Siberia, but their journey, on foot and in chains, was interrupted for reasons of health in Moscow. (They had been severely beaten and were not well enough to walk in chains to Siberia, apparently.) After they had been imprisoned in Moscow for some sixteen years, and twenty-one years after the horrors had begun, a new Tsar, Alexander II, came to power, and brought with him a kinder, gentler absolutism. The brothers Shapiro were finally exonerated in 1856. The whole story was described more than eighty years later in a series of articles in the New York Yiddish press, which was later turned into an English book, called The Drama of Slavuta . Here is the stuff of a popular legend: The way back from Moscow was a continual triumph for the brothers Shapiro. Great respect and love was shown to them everywhere. In many Jewish cities they were met with song, orchestra and dancing . For the handful of Jews in Kiev, that still remembered the verdict against the Slavuta Publishers, their traveling through constituted a particular joy. And what • took place in Slavuta upon their arrival, is difficult to describe. The entire town, from small children to adults , - 71 -

came out to meet them. The streets were jammed, it was difficult to push one's way through . Everyone wanted to see, greet them , give "Sholom Alaykhem" to the two elders that came home after twenty years of pain and suffering. 2

Even today, 150 years later, if you mention Slavuta and the brothers Shapiro among Hasidim, you will hear this story and more. In their culture, the tale has come to represent the worst of Tsarist repression, and the ultimate victory of faith. In any event, it was back to Slavuta that the brothers Shapiro, grandsons of Pinchas, returned as heroes, in 1856. One brother soon settled in Shepetovka, where he served as a rabbi. He died in 1863. The other brother, Pinchas (ben Moshe) Shapiro, remained in Slavuta, and died there at age eighty, in 1872. Why am I telling you this story? Because, in 1880, Moshe Feldenkrais' mother, Sheyndl Pshater, was born in Slavuta; and, twenty-four years later, so was Moshe-Pinchas Feldenkrais.

What's in a Name? Family tradition and circumstantial evidence are the only actual "proof" we have that Moshe Feldenkrais is actually related to Pinchas of Koretz. Moshe was sure of it, and there is every reason to credit the tradition, but the family tree that connects them is missing several branches. Our best clues lie in the names. In the traditional Jewish world, given names were far more significant than family names, and were passed very consistently down the generations. Thus, Pinchas of Koretz's grandfather was named Pinchas. And Pinchas of Koretz named his second son Moshe, and Moshe founded the press, and named one of his own sons Pinchas, who, as noted above, died in Slavuta in 1872. So when, in 1904, years after the scandalous trials of the brothers Shapiro, Feldenkrais's mother named her first-born Moshe-Pinchas, that combination of names would have been a telling one, and must have had a very special resonance for her family and her neighbours. And for a growing boy, as well. So, my best guess is that Moshe's mothers mother was the daughter of Pinchas Shapiro of Slavuta,one of the famous Shapiro brothers. - 72 -

And I could be wrong. She could also be a descendant of Pinchas of Koretz's daughter, Rukhl Sheyndl Sore, who is also said to be buried in the SlavutaJewish cemetery. 3 These are admittedly slim clues. To firmly establish the connections across some three or four missing generations would require research in the archives in Kiev. In any case, however this genealogy is constructed, Moshe Feldenkrais was raised in the conviction that he was a descendant of the much revered Pinchas of Koretz, on his mother's side. On his father's side, there was another highly respected sage, Rabbi Yona (of Ostrog), whom we will meet in Chapter 9. Both rabbis belong to the first generations of Hasidism, and in the world in which Moshe was raised, such things counted for a lot, on various levels of life. Here below, noble lineage (yikhus)brought with it a certain social cachet. Perhaps more importantly, one could appeal to saintly ancestors for high-quality assistance from on high. (See Chapter 16.) These connections were a cornerstone of his family's identity, and of his own, and they are carved into his gravestone in Tel Aviv. f'

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r~iin~ n,no1N, P'1ll "Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, son of Shey ndl and Arieh , may their memory be for a blessing 11 descendant of Rabbi Pinhas of Koretz and the tzaddikim of Ostroh-Volin"

- Photograph by Ramona Dekel, Tel Aviv. - 73 -

1 It was re-opened in 1847, by the sons of the exiled brothers Shapiro. They relocated the shop to nearby Zhitomir, and contin ued the tradition of publishing fine editions of classical and mystical writings, including an early collection of the teachings of their great -grandfather, Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz. 2 Saul Moiseyevich Ginsburg, (Ephraim H. Prombaum, trans.) The Drama of Slavuta. (Lanham: University Press of America, 1991) 143. 3 According to a now defunct website, www.jewishroots.com, based in Kiev.

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Chapter 9 Family of Origin Moshe's maternal grandparents lived in a big house in the centre of Slavuta. They were well off by the standards of the day, when the vast majority ofJews in the region lived in dire poverty. His grandfather, Yekhiel Mikhael Pshater , ran a substantial business in forestry and wood products. Moshe said proudly that the charcoal they made was of such high quality that one could rub it on a white shirt without leaving a mark! Reb Yekhiel was a pillar of the community, and known for his piety and generosity. Moshe's grandmother , Rivkah, had her hands full with raising nine children. The family's connection to Pinchas of Koretz is said to have run through her side of the family , though the details are unclear. While theirs was a religious household, it could also be described, in the terms of the day, as an "enlightened" one. This "enlightenment " was a very particular term, having nothing to do with Nirvana . In the history of European Jewry, "enlightened" meant that one was making an accommodation with the modern world, and stepping, however tentatively, out of the cocoon of tradition . From the very beginning of the "enlightenment movement" (haskalah), the "enlighteners" (maskilim) were at odds with many Hasidic practices, and the two groups were in continuous confrontation. (We met some of the early maskilim in the story of the Slovita press.) The Pshaters provided both a religious and a secular education to their sons and their daughters, and this, in itself, was a sign of great change. The oldest daughter was Sheyndl, Moshe's mother. 1 She took full advantage of the unique opportunity to study; she was especially fond of Russian literature. She was very generous and possessed of a strong social conscience . Together with other similarly privil eged young women , she set up a night school for the less well-to-do girls of the town. In these years, at the end of the 19th century , traditional ways were facing tremendous pressure from inside and out. The conflict between tradition and modernity, insularity and worldliness, was felt inside every family and every individual - 75 -

in that culture. It was a world on the verge of cataclysmic change.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker Enlightenment or no enlightenment, traditions were very much in force in turn-of-the-century Slavuta, as the story of Moshe's parents' marriage will show . Moshe's father was born in Ostrog (Ostroh in Yiddish), in the former province of Volhynia (Volin in Yiddish). In his 1981 autobiographical interview, videotaped in Amherst, 2 Moshe recounts how his grandfather Yekhiel went out one day to find a husband for Sheyndl. It was a given in those days that finding a good shidduch (match) for one's children was the culminating act of parenthood. And to marry off the well-educated daughter of a wealthy and religious merchant was no small matter. A worthy groom was required. Grandfather Pshater went to the yeshiva (religious seminary) in Ostrog, and sat down with the principal. Yekhiel was looking for a scholar for his well-educated daughter, and the principal proposed his very best, an ilui, a genius in Talmudic studies. He had a fine pedigree, as a descendent of a legendary Ostrog tzaddik from the founding generation of Hasidism. Yekhiel was convinced, and a match was made between Sheyndl Pshater and Aryeh Leyb Feldenkrais. Moshe says they made a very attractive couple, despite being hitched, as was the custom , sight-unseen. The legendary ancestor on his father's side 3 was known by the townspeople, in Yiddish, as reb yoinele der guter, in Hebrew as Rabbi Yona, ha-tov v'ha-meytiv - "Rabbi Yona, the good and the beneficent." As a boy of eleven, visiting Ostrog, Moshe seems to have been touched by the legends of the saintliness of this Rabbi Yona, to whom many miracles were ascribed. And he was also touched by the affection he received by virtue of his being reb yoinele's descendent. On the 1981 video Moshe's eyes sparkle and his hands fly as he retells stories that he heard way back when, one of which appears, with commentary, in Appendix II. Rabbi Yona, about whom we know very little beyond his legendary stature, in fact, gets far more air time in the interview than Moshe's father. This is interesting, in and of itself. - 76 -

It is said that a great struggle with his father lay at the root of Moshe's departure from home at the age of fourteen. In the Amherst interview, there is a lot left unsaid. The stories Moshe tells of reb yoinele and others are the memories of an eleven-year-old boy, recounted some sixtyfour years (and several languages) after he left the old country. They are precious for the feelings they reveal; meanwhile there appears to be a lot of conflation going on. In Moshe's telling, the legendary rabbi becomes the hero of a classic Hasidic story, as well as the saviour of his city during a famous battle around 1800. In other anecdotes he appears to take on some of the attributes of Ostroh's most famous rabbi, the MaHaRSHA (Rabbi Shmuel Eliezer Edeles). One thing we can say for certain: reb yoinele and the legends attributed to him were important for the young Moshe and his family. How do we know this? ... other than from the fact that Moshe starts his autobiographic interview with reb yoinele stories? Moshe-Pinchas had three younger siblings. Yona (yoinele), who was named after the legendary rabbi, was said to have been a child prodigy in mathematics; he died at the age of thirteen . And, although this detail belongs in a future biography, it is not irrelevant to mention here that Moshe fell in love with and married a woman named Yona. Another brother, Baruch, known as Berele when he was young, was involved in the Israeli shipping industry and founded the Alef (Aleph) publishing company in Tel Aviv, which published a number of Moshe's early books . His sister, Malka 4 Silice (nee Feldenkrais), became a scientist (and an adept at Judo) and lived most of her days in France, surviving the Nazi occupation in hiding. Malka was the mother of Michel and Arielle. Michel, whose home was Tel Aviv, represented the family in the Feldenkrais community until his passing in 2009 . Arielle, who lives in France, now holds that position.

1 For more information on Moshe's remarkable mother, see the biographical essay by Werner Kraus, "Sheindel Feldenkrais (1880-1969)" in Werner Kraus, ed., Moshe Feldenkrais: 1904-2004; zum 100. Geburtstag. (Graz: Institut fur Bewegungsmanagement : Eigenverlag, 2004). 2 Moshe Feldenkrais, autobiographical interview, unpublished video recording (Paris: International Feldenkrais Federation, 1981).

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There is scant information available concerning Rabbi Yona . My sources are the yizkor bukh (memory book ) of Ostrog , and a biographical dictionary of religious figures in Ostrog , Sefer mazkeret l'gedolei ostroha, by Mendel Biber, published in Berditchev in 190 7. (See bibliography) • For more information on Malka, Moshe's sister, see http:/ /feldenkrais-method .org/ en/node/401. 3

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Chapter 10 Geopolit ics Moshe was born in 1904, a time of great insecurity for the Jews of the Russian Empire. Between 1903 and 1906 there was a wave of pogroms (anti-Semitic rioting, pillaging, rapes and murders). Moshe recalled, under hypnosis, hiding in the subsub-basement of his uncle's house in Slavuta while the shooting and pillaging carried on above . He would not have been more than two years old at the time .1 In the pogrom years in Ukraine, the Jewish self-defence movement was born. Another book could be written about this, as the necessity of self-defence ultimately defined Moshe's life as thoroughly as any other element of his cultural background. When Moshe was about four years old, the famil y moved from Slavuta to Kremenetz, where his father's mother 's family lived . This seems to have been the most peaceful period of Moshe's childhood, with much time spent in the hills around the town . Three years later they moved northwards to the booming new city of Baranovichi , now located in Belarus. Baranovichi had developed at the end of the 19th century from an isolated farmstead into a major railway hub, sitting at the intersection of the lines from Berlin to Moscow and from Vilna to Vienna. Baranovichi had other things going for it beside the railroad: it was surrounded by thick forests , and thus, with the railway line, it was an attractive spot for lumber merchants. It was also close to the Polish border, and the local economy prospered from provisioning the imperial Russian army. This growing city , quite "modern" for its time, with its excellent transportation connections, became a magnet for Jewish settlement. It was soon the home of a variety of Yiddish- and Hebrew -language schools, a flourishing Jewish press , synagogues, yeshivas, charities, sports leagues, and political parties of all stripes . A good place for a progressive young Jewish famil y, with interests in the forest industry, to settle . Alas, all the things that made Baranovichi a boomtownresources, rail lines, proximity to the border-also made it a hot piece of military real estate when war broke out in 1914. Moshe was ten years old . - 79 -

Here are some of the things that went on in Baranovichi during Moshe's adolescence: espionage, forced labour, aerial bombardment, dogfights over the town, poison gas wafting in from the front, arson, looting, disappearances, waves of refugees, anti-Semitic violence, armies chasing one another back and forth through the town , troops of one side and then the other billeted in the yards, barns, and houses, forced requisitioning of livestock and foodstuffs, famine, frequent changes in government, and periods of no government at all. 2 There is not much on record of Moshe's direct experience with the violence and chaos, but what there is is telling: Moshe was travelling with his father and four others from Slavuta to Baranovichi in a horse-drawn cart when the group was attacked by Cossack bandits. Two of Moshe's party were killed, and Moshe 's father took one of the shafts of the cart and killed the leader of the bandits. The rest of them fled. 3 By the time he was fourteen years old, Moshe had seen more than his fair share of the dark side of life. His own family was ruined financially , his father was obliged to spend most of the war years apart from his family, his mother was looking after streams of refugees, the Russian Empire was crumbling around them, revolution was in the air, and the future of the Jews of all Eastern Europe was in doubt. At the time, Moshe was attending a Hebrew-speaking, Zionist secondary school, where the favoured solution was a radical one: leave the current catastrophe and rebuild society from the bottom up. The idea was to do this in the territory of the ancient kingdoms of Israel, but that real estate was located in a number of provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and, like Baranovichi, it was also on the front lines of the World War. The Turks were allied with the Germans, and both were at war with Russia, Britain, France and the U.S. The Zionist movement had initially tried, at the turn of the 20th century, to interest Kaiser Wilhelm and the Ottoman leadership in their project, but neither the Kaiser nor the Sultan was interested. The Kaiser was a confirmed anti-Semite, and the Ottomans suspected, quite correctly , that the Zionist project would ultimately lead to demands for autonomy. When the war broke out, it became apparent that the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs. Great Britain, which - 80 -

already was in possession of Egypt, looked to be a major beneficiary. And of all the European powers, Britain was the least hostile to Jews, and the most sympathetic, for reasons of her own, with the Zionist project. As the war drew to a close, the victorious allies set about dismembering the Ottoman Empire, which, from what is now called Turkey, had ruled the entire Middle East for centuries. It is worthwhile remembering that there were no nation-states in the region at the time, only provinces ruled by the Sultan (political head), who was also the Caliph (religious head) of the region. And it was in those days, in the latter part of the war and the immediate post-war period, that the seeds of today's headlines were planted. Such newsworthy modern entities as Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia were created ex nihilo by the stroke of pen, an implement wielded by British and French diplomats and sanctified by the League of Nations. After much lobbying and backing and farthing, the British government came to see a community of interests with the Zionist movement . And in November of 1917, British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour declared: "His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." And, on December 9, 1917, the British, under General Allenby, marched into Jerusalem and became the rulers of what they called Palestine, which included what we now call Jordan, Palestine and Israel, with their rule later mandated by the League of Nations. The news reached Baranovichi in a flash. And, in 1918, in the company of a group of young pioneers, fourteen-year-old Moshe-Pinchas Feldenkrais set off to help create that "national home," and, as he observed much later, to get away from his family. And he never looked back. Of course, as he travelled through war-torn central Europe to the Adriatic, and on through the Eastern Mediterranean to the little tent city that was Tel Aviv, Moshe and his companions were all engaged in not looking back at the same place. For young Moshe, as for thousands of other young pioneers, the world changed radically and it also held together. They left behind a distinctly traditional world (arranged marriages, rigid ethnic divides, strong gender and dietary - 81 -

taboos , etc.) and arrived, after month s of arduous travel, at the building site of a fast-developing and mostly secular societ y. And , because they experienced these changes together, there were also continuities, of family ties, of language , of feeling, of common structures of thought. Moshe himself seems to have quickly settled in with a group from his home town, the "Baranovichi Group ." Perhaps there is an eighteen-year-old Moshe in this picture, which shows the Baranovichi group, in 1922, laying the foundations of a new synagogue.

"The Barano vichi Group ," building foundations in Tel Aviv . 1922. From th e Baranovichi Book of Remembranc e.

In the traditional view, the Tzaddik, with his introspection and his total reliance on God, was the predominant model of Jewish manhood. In the yishuv, the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine, there was a different model altogether. The ideology of the post-war wave of immigrants to Palestine included manual labour, self-defence , self-reliance, sexual liberation and socialism. The descendants of people for whom meekness and martyrdom were virtues were turning themselves into pioneers and warriors, and young Moshe was there in the middle of it.

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The Fate of the Old Country Moshe left for British Mandate Palestine and behind him the situation of Jews of Eastern Europe continued to worsen. When the First World War came to an end in 1918, the Russian Revolution was already under way, and the Empire was crumbling. Soon there was war between a newly Communist Russia and a newly independent Poland over the territories that lay between them, including Belarus and the western Ukraine. Meanwhile, a civil war was raging between the Bolshevik forces (Red Army) and the forces that represented the old regime or opposed the Bolsheviks (White Army). The old regime was notoriously anti-Semitic, and the White Army brought in its wake a return of murderous pogroms, while the collapse of agriculture and food distribution resulted in mass starvation. The Soviet Army was victorious in the Civil War, but not in the war with Poland, and what was left of the towns of Koretz, Slavuta, Kremenetz and Baranovichi was now part of the Polish Republic, and remained so until the German Blitzkrieg of September 1939. According to the terms of the "non-aggression" pact between Hitler and Stalin, signed one week before the Blitzkrieg, the Polish Republic was divided up, like the winnings of a card game, between Germany and the Soviet Union. Now Koretz, Slavuta, Kremenetz, Ostrog and Baranovichi were back on Stalin's side of the table. And given the options, the Jews of the Soviet sector considered themselves the lucky ones. On the downside, when the Red Army arrived in the fall of 1939, most Jewish institutions were shut down. As for the non-aggression pact, it did not last long. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Empire, began on June 22, 1941. On July 2, German troops entered Koretz, where the humble Pinchas had once taught. That summer, about five hundred Jews were murdered. After a harsh winter of deprivation and forced labour, another couple of thousand were killed in the spring. The survivors were crowded into a ghetto. With the exception of the fifty or so who escaped to the forests to fight as partisans, the rest were murdered when the ghetto was burned in the fall of 1942. - 83 -

In Kremenetz, where Moshe spent a few idyllic years before moving to Baranovichi, Jews were forced into a ghetto, which became the scene of desperate armed resistance. Of those who survived the battle, 1,500 were taken away as slaves . In all, some 19,000 Jews were killed in Kremenetz in 1942. When the Nazis entered Slavuta, where Moshe was born, those Jewish inhabitants who had not managed to flee were slaughtered; among them, three hundred children thrown into a well, in 1941. In June of 1941, the population of Baranovichi was 30,000, of whom 12,000 were Jews. Three thousand of these were refugees from western Poland, which had been under German occupation for the previous twenty-one months. By December of 1942, apart from some hundreds who managed to escape into the forests, all the Jews of Baranovichi were dead, shot on the edge of graves that had been dug by the strong among them, and buried by the strong, who were shot in turn . Moshe was involved in the war effort as both a scientist and a martial arts trainer. While SS death squads were shooting and burning and burying alive his former friends and neighbours in Ukraine, Moshe was working for the British Admiralty in Scotland. He was also involved in training British soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile in France, from which he had fled to England in 1939 when the Germans invaded, his little self-defence book, La Defense du faible contre l'agresseur (The Defence of the Weak against the Attacker) was used as a training manual by the Resistance.

Listening to History It stands to reason that any approach to appreciating the life of Moshe Feldenkrais would have to take into consideration some of the century's darkest shadows. We would have to consider the waves of pogroms that bloodied Ukraine in Moshe's infancy. We would have to take to heart the ever deepening hell that was the First World War, the Polish-Russian War, and the Russian Civil War. And then, the Second World War and the Holocaust, including the destruction of the Jewish communities of Slavuta, Kremenetz, Baranovichi, and Ostrog with a barbarism that had never before been seen. - 84 -

It is almost impossible to write about these things , and just as hard to read about them. And if we cannot hold the extent of these events in our own minds for more than a few moments, how can we possibly appreciate their echo in the soul of someone who was born and raised there? In the memorial book 4 (yizkor-bukh) of Ostrog, birthplace of Moshe's father, there is a list of names of townspeople who died in the holocaust . Among them: Devorah Feldenkrais, Lova Feldenkrais, Max Motl Feldenkrais, Liyova Feldenkrais, Tsipora Feldenkrais, Shmuel Feldenkrais, Hana Feldenkrais, Muni Feldenkrais, Yisroel Feldenkrais, Golda Feldenkrais, Zisl Feldenkrais, and a woman whose first name is forgotten. The name Feldenkrais would be far less idiosyncratic for us had it not been for genocide . What does a man feel when his hometown is wiped out, where both the babies and the graves are destroyed? Where does a warrior put such feelings? Where do they re-emerge in his character, his motivations, his teachings? What part do they play in his devotion to a Jewish homeland? When a man such as this says that the capacity to recover from trauma is a primary sign of health, to whom is he speaking, and from what depths does this insight come?

1 Mark Reese, "Feldenkrais: An Illustrated Biography and Resource. Chapt er One: Eastern European Roots," The Feldenkrais Journal , Spring 2004. No. 17, p. 9. 2 Rubin Kaplan, My Memoirs: From Palonkeh and Baranovichi, Belarus, 1904 to 1922 (http://www. jewishgen.org /yiz kor /Baranovichi/baranovichi.html ). 3 Mark Reese, 14. 4 Yitzchak Alperowitz (ed.). Sefer Ostrog (Voh lin) : matsevet zikaron le-kehila kedosha. (Tel Aviv, 1987)

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Section Two: Resonance

Chapter 11 Liste ni ng for Connection s Now, what we are going to do now, that simple thingvery, very simple-is actually one of the major achievements of my life . . . the fact that I am able, and I have learned , and evolved a method, which allows me to turn abstract ideas into concrete, simple acts, so that any human being can do it, feel it, and realize, that he is actually not only a body, but also a brain ... because without a brain, the body wouldn't be worth anything. Anaesthetize your brain, and you will see what is your body is worth. 1 - Moshe Feldenkrais

We are now roughly mid-way through our journey, and it is time to consider Feldenkrais's life work in the light of his roots, and vice versa. We will look at a number of aspects of the work, in particular, certain core assumptions. It is not given to us to say with certainty that this or that specific aspect of Moshe's teaching is derived from this or that specific circumstance in his background. It is possible however, and probably very usefu l, to listen to the background, and to notice where Moshe's teachings "map onto" aspects of the old traditio n , as well as places where they seem to be reacting to, or compensating for, such aspects. There is a lot to be learned by simply listening to the background and the foreground, and noticing the unspoken dialogue between them. From time to time I will refer to Moshe's own declaration, cited at the head of this chapter, about turning the abstract into the concrete. As we examine aspects of the tradition, and hold them up next to aspects of Moshe's teaching, this dy- 87 -

namic seems to emerge very clearly; that is, it often appears there is an element in the intellectual or spiritual background which, in the Feldenkrais work, finds its echo in the field of gravity. Firstly, however, let's look at the statement itself, the very notion of turning "abstract ideas into concrete, simple acts. 11 For this, too, indicates a way of thinking, with a dynamic of its own. This formulation is central to the spiritual background. Then it shows up in the project to which Moshe devoted his youth. And then it shows up in the Feldenkrais Method . The journey from abstraction to manifestation is the archetype of creation; it is the central preoccupation of Jewish mystical thinking. Adin Steinsaltz, one of the most prolific and respected of contemporary Jewish scholars, writes: "The relation between Torah and the world is ... the relation between idea and actualization, between vision and fulfillment. 112 Creation flows from the most abstract, the most ungraspable, immaterial and undifferentiated realm of infinite possibility, through an indivisible continuum of manifestation, into material form or action . According to the Hasidic dispensation, which is itself based on Kabbalistic thinking, even ordinary people can play a part in the divine work of continuously remaking the world, if they align themselves with the creative process by fulfilling the mitzvot with the correct intention. The Zionist movement, which got underway in the late 19th century, looked with exasperation on this approach. If the utterly miserable situation on the ground were going to improve, it was argued, it would require an exercise of will, and concrete economic and political measures. The movement's entire goal was to take abstract longings for an end to the state of exile and turn them into an embodied reality. Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, said as much, when he pronounced: "If you will it, it is not just a story." This notion, then, of making the abstract concrete, was in some way the anthem of a revolutionary generation. And if Zionism's goal was to make a dream concrete, Moshe himself embodied it as concretely as can be imagined: he left a Zionist high school in Baranovichi and went to work - 88 -

pouring concrete foundations for the new city of Tel Aviv. Think of this when you see a picture of Tel Aviv: in 1909, that city was made up entirely of sand dunes, tents and dreams. Later, when Moshe launched into the world of human reeducation, he brought this anthem with him . So when he speaks of the capacity to live one's dream, his words have a certain substance, in a manner of speaking. So much for the anthem. Moshe's declaration begs the following question: Which abstract ideas was he talking about? My best guess is that they include everything that he considered true and useful, whenever and wherever he found it. This would obviously include biomechanics and electrical circuitry and developmental physiology and the esoteric schools with which he was familiar. It stands to reason it might also include the tradition in which he was raised . Let's look beneath apparent differences in language, belief, dress and life-style for resonance between the background and the foreground. Let's listen to the ways Moshe and his ancestors approached the same questions. In the chapters that follow we will consider a series of parallels between the premises of the Moshe's teaching and the thinking of his ancestors. In the next chapter, the twelfth, we look at one salient connection, learning, and consider the ways that Moshe's very particular approach resonates with that of his Jewish and Hasidic forebears. In chapter 13, "Organization , Awareness, and the Work of Unification," we look at the way whole systems are organized, and consider the way the dynamics of this organization show up in the tradition and in the Method . In chapter 14, "Further Resonances," we go into a number of other connections that may be less obvious because they appear in such disparate garb. In chapter 15, we have consider some of the ways that one's language structures one's thinking and one's teaching. In chapter 16, Moshe-Pinchas Feldenkrais himself speaks to the question through a collection of anecdotes. After that , by way of gaining a different perspective on the path we have travelled, we look into a fateful encounter between the Feldenkrais Method and one of the leaders of - 89 -

contemporary Hasidism, and listen to feedback from a number of modern Hasidim about their own encounters with the Method. And then we return from our journey with a look at the big picture. And then there are some stories to share .

Moshe Feldenkrais, Recording of Dallas workshop, 1981. Adin Steinsaltz, The ThirteenPetalledRose:A Discourseon the Essence of Jewish Existenceand Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2006) 66. 1

2

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Chapter 12 Learning Learning is making connections-on the most concrete and the most abstract levels . Through restoring or making new connections, we can improve the most basic motor skills and the deepest and subtlest attitudes of mind. Feldenkrais's passion for the subject of learning was in evidence long before the development of the Feldenkrais Method. In 1929, just before he went off to Paris to study, Moshe published a Hebrew translation of a work on Coue's method of autosuggestion. Feldenkrais's approach to Judo, as described in Higher Judo (1952), is not about throws and falls: "The essential aim of Judo is to teach, help and forward adult maturity 1 • • • 11 With the promulgation of his own Method, Feldenkrais takes this learning off the Judo mat and into the movements of everyday life. In "The Elusive Obvious, 11 published in 1981, he wrote: "I do not treat people, I do not cure people, and I do not teach people . I tell them stories because I believe that learning is the most important thing for a human being . 112 And clearly he does, because by the time that credo was published, he had been writing about learning for some fifty-two years. Now, there are many ways to change lives besides learning. For example, there is power, there is violence , there is conditioning , there is doctrine, there are beliefs . Moshe , however , came from a culture in which learning is not a preparation for something else, but a form of serving the oneness of God . Barry Holtz, a scholar of the Jewish tradition of scholarship , writes: "The world, according to the ancient rabbis, rests on three pillars-study, worship, and good deeds. And which of these is the greatest? Study-since from study the others can be deduced. 113 Learning thus has the highest value, and the learned individual, and not the bully or the technocrat, is accorded pride of place in the society. And so it stands to reason that , coming from this background, Moshe would choose learning as the most useful path for serving the wholeness of both individual and society. Now there is learning by rote and there is learning for self- 91 -

improvement . Feldenkrais was very particular about the optimal conditions for this latter kind of learning. These conditions are elements of his methodology that do not come from the sciences. Nor do they show up in most settings of contemporary education, or in most religious training. Butand this is one of the things that first piqued my curiositymany of them do show up in the teachings of Moshe's Hasidic forebears. Here is a brief compendium; in most cases, I let the Hasidim do the talking . Occasionally, you will also hear from Moshe or one of his students. The teacher is not the ultimate authority; the teacher helps by providing a climate for learning:

Rabbi Samuel Shinager came to Rabbi Bunam for the first time and introduced himself . Rabbi Bunam said: "If you want to be a good Jew, you came to the wrong place. If you want to learn to be a good Jew, you have come to the right place. What I offer is learning." 4 The Yehudi Ha-Kadosh taught: "The true spiritual leader need not read the souls of his adherents . He should instruct them so that they can read their own souls and thus can eject all that is spurious." 5 Feldenkrais wrote: "I do not intend to 'teach' you, but to enable you to learn at your own rate of understanding and doing." 6 The best climate for learning is a culture of questioning. The best learning leads to action. The Hebrew word that is translated as "knowing" in the English Bible is a bit deeper than that. "Knowing" is not passive, but generative; to wit: "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived." (Gen. 4:1) The following story comes from the Talmud, so it was written down approximately 1700 years ago: Rabbi Tarfon sat conversing on serious matters with other learned men in a house in Lod. The question was raised: "W hich is more important-learning or action?" Rabbi Tarfon replied , "Action is more important. Of - 92 -

what earthly use are fine words and preachments unless they are put into practice?" Rabbi Akiba upheld the contrary viewpoint: "Learning is more important, he said. The sages finally concluded that both were right. "Learning is more important when it leads to action," they declared. 7 11

Everyone learns in his or her own way: Pinchas taught: "We read, Moses said: 'Let my teachings fall like the rain' [Deut. 32:2]. We see that rain falls upon many kinds of plants, and each grows according to its own nature. In the same fashion, let instruction be accepted by all persons : each one will profit according to his inherent ability." 8 Feldenkrais taught: "For successful learning we must proceed at our own rate ."9 Feldenkrais also taught: "Organic learning is individual, and without a teacher who is striving for results within a certain time, it lasts as long as the learner keeps at it." 10

Nothing can be forced, and rushing will not help: Pinchas also taught: "What you pursue, you don't get . But what you allow to grow slowly, in its own way, comes to you." 11 Also from Pinchas: "There are people all of whose thoughts and movements are done in great haste and without peace of mind ... The speed of their thinking bums up their thoughts, and thus nothing actually comes from them ."12 Feldenkrais wrote: "No one can learn when hurried and hustled." 13

Learning must be pleasurable: The BeShT taught: "The chief value of a mitzvah is its performance with pleasure." 14 The Alexanderer Rabbi said: "We read in Isaiah 55:12: 'For ye shall go out with joy.' This means: 'If we are habitually joyful, we shall be released from every tribulation. " 15 Feldenkrais taught: "Leaming must be pleasurable, and it - 93 -

must be easy; the two make breathing simple. What is learnt otherwise rarely becomes habitually spontaneous. 1116 Don't try to do things well:

Pinchas is reported to have said: "Why is it that everything a baby does has grace and he enjoys and accepts what is in front of him? Because he acts without an ulterior motive [divided consciousness], and thus anyone who acts without an ulterior motive will enjoy and accept everything, even if he makes funny faces ." 17 Feldenkrais wrote: "An act becomes nice when we do nothing but the act. Everything we do over and above that, or short of it, destroys harmony. 1118 One can learn from anything:

There was a time when every word one heard was a Torah, and everything one saw was a form of instruction in how to live and serve. 19 Learning is furthered more by hearing than by reading:

There was a man who wrote down the torah of the BeShT that he heard from him. Once the BeShT saw a demon walking and holding a book in his hand. He said to him: "What is the book that you hold in your hand? He answered him: "This is the book that you have written." The BeShT then understood that there was a person who was writing down his torah. He gathered all his followers and asked them: "Who among you is writing down my torah?" The man admitted it and he brought the manuscript to the BeShT. The BeShT examined it and said: "There is not even a single word here that is mine .1120 (Moshe rigourously forbade his students to take notes in class.) Pinchas taught: "Every word of Torah that a man reads from a book is on the level of the body (gut), but what he hears from mouth to ear is on the level of the soul (neshamah). 1121 Rabbi Simchah Bunam, like Moshe's father and grandfather, was a lumber merchant, before he came to devote himself entirely to teaching. He travelled frequently on business, and - 94 -

kept the company of all sorts of people. Once he was asked this question by one of his companions: "Simchah, why do you go around and visit all these Rebbes when you could just as well learn this stuff from books?" Simchah Bunam tried to get the idea across to them, but he had no luck. That night, his companions went off to the theatre and invited him to come along, but he declined. When they got back, they told him what a great show he had missed. "No need to tell me about it," said Simchah Bunam, "I have read the program." "How could you possibly get from the program what we experienced by actually being there?" said one of his companions. "Nu," said Simchah Bunam, "Now you know why I go to see the Rebbes."

Learning employs paradox: Pinchas taught : "A man cannot be consciously good unless he knows evil. No one can appreciate pleasure unless he has tasted bitterness. 1122 Feldenkrais taught: "You will see that as long as you cannot do the opposite, you do not know how to do the regular pattern." 23

You have to do your own homework. Imitation is useless: The Rabbi of Kotzk said: "Everything in the world can be imitated, except truth. For truth that is imitated is no longer truth." 24 (As cited in the preface:) When Rabbi Noah, Rabbi Mordechai's son, assumed the succession after his father's death , his disciples noticed that there were a number of ways in which he conducted himself differently from his father, and asked him about this. "I do just as my father did ," he replied . "he did not imitate , and I do not imitate." 25

Feldenkrais trainer Yvan Joly wrote: "I have always believed that for us to teach 'his work,' we have to imitate neither his history nor his personality. The Method is a certain way of approaching life and learning awareness and making it - 95 -

our own personal process."

26

The ultimate teacher is inside us:

[Pinchas's disciple] Rabbi Rafael of Bershad used to say: "I learned from my Master that if I will walk with Truth, my soul will instruct me, and I shall need no other teacher. "27 [Pinchas's disciple] Rabbi Meir used to say: "There is no man whose soul is not teaching him in every instant. "28 The teacher's own inner work is central to his/her usefulness as a teacher:

The Rabbi of Ger once asked one of his disciples who was a guest in his house, what thoughts he had on the way to him. The man replied: "Hasidim come to the rabbi with all manner of requests, some because they have business troubles, others because they are sick or the like. 'What has all this to do with the rabbi? ' I asked myself." "And what did you answer yourself?" ask the Tzaddik. "I told myself," said the disciple, "that the rabbi helps those who come to him to make the turning [i.e., to tum away from the ego's perspective] and thus raises them to a higher rung, from which their prayers will more readily be heard." "I see it differently," said the Tzaddik. "The rabbi reflects: 'What am I and what is my life that these people should come to me and ask me to pray for them? Why, I am nothing but a drop in the bucket!' And in this way he makes the turning and is uplifted and since he has linked his being to those who sought him out, salvation flows from him into them. "29

Learning and healing are not separate: The archetype of the Hasidic sage was the Baal Shem Tov. His profession had two sides to it: he was known as both a healer and a sage. The same was said of Pinchas of Koretz. It was assumed that a wise man would be able to heal; it was not assumed that someone skilled in specific remedies was wise. Feldenkrais wrote: "Organic learning is essential. It can also be therapeutic in essence. It is healthier to learn than to be a patient or even be cured." 30 - 96 -

In the old tradition, and in the new teachings, learning holds pride of place, and it carries a meaning for both individual and society that transcends its own subject matter, whatever that may be.

1

Moshe Feldenkrais, Higher Judo: Ground Work (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1952) xii. 2 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious (Cupertino: Meta Publications , 1981) 118. 3 Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (New York: Summit Books, 1984) 12. 4 Louis I. Newman, ed., The Hasidic Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1963) 458 (D.K. paraphrase). 5 Louis I. Newman , ed., Maggidim and Hasidim: Their Wisdom (New York: Bloch Publishing Company , 1962) 99. 6 Moshe Feldenkr ais,"Learn to Learn" http: // www.feldenkrais-wien.at / article-1.htm. 7

Nathan Ausubel, ed., A Treasury of Jewish Folklore (New York: Crown, 1948) 42 . 8 Louis I. Newman, ed. , The Hasidic Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1963) 459 . 9 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious (Cupertino: Meta Publications, 1981) 91. 10 Feldenkrais , 30. ''Martin Buber, ed., (0 . Marx, trans .), Tal es of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) 129. 12 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, Midrash Pinchas ha-shalem (Ashdod : Yishlim , 2001) 1:18 (D.K., trans.). 13 Moshe Feldenkrais, "Learn to Learn" http: // www.feldenkrais-wien .at/ article-1.htm. 14

Newman, 203 . Newman, 202. 16 Moshe Feldenkrais , The Elusive Obvious (Cupertino: Meta Publications, 1981) 92. 17 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, (Yechezkiel Sharga Frankel, ed .), Imre Pinchas ha-shalem (1st ed .) (B'nei Brak: Yechezkiel Sharga Frankel, 1998) 207 (D.K., trans.) 18 Moshe Feldenkrais,"Learnto Learn"http:/ / www.feldenkrais-wien.at/artide-1.htm. 19 Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, (Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, ed.), From Day to Day (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2005) 90 . 20 Dan Ben-Amos and Mintz, Jerome, trans . and eds. , In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Shivhei ha-Besht) (New York: Schocken, 1984) 179 . 21 EliezerSteinman, Seferber ha-hasidut (TelAviv: Knesset, 1950) 345 (D.K.,trans.). 15

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22

Newman, 97:6 . Moshe Feldenkrais , The Feldenkrais Method®: Awareness Through Movemen ~ Lessons: Dr . Moshe Feldenkrais at Alexander Yanai (Paris: International Felden-krais Federation, 1995) Vol. I:A, lesson no. 18, p . 107. 24 Martin Buber, ed., (0. Marx, trans .), Tales of the Hasidim: The Later Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1948) 284 . 25 Buber, 157. 26 Yvan Joly, "Moments with Moshe, " In Touch (Feldenkrais Guild® of North America: 2nd Quarter, 2004) 4. 27 Newman, 189. 28 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz , Midrash Pinchas ha-shalem (Ashdod: Yishlim, 2001) 11 (D.K., trans. ). 29 Buber, 3 10. 30 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious (Cupertino: Meta Publications, 1981) 29. 23

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Chapter 13 Organization, Awareness, and the Work of Unification A genius is someone who can take the principles from one discipline and apply them in another. 1 In general, it is not what we do that is important, but - Moshe Feldenkrais how we do it.2 To be aware of connections is to redirect our attention from things themselves (structures) to the way things work together (functions), and from actions to the way the action is performed. Feldenkrais spoke of the "what" and the "how." The first is obvious, the second elusive. In his book, The Elusive Obvious, Feldenkrais wrote: "I believe that we actually limit ourselves by an undue and erroneous emphasis on what is important to the society of men at the neglect of how. "3 "Life is a process, not a thing," said Moshe. 4 "Man's life is a continuous process, and the improvement is needed in the quality of the process, not in his properties or disposition. 115 This understanding differentiates the Method from many other approaches, which are concerned with the manipulation of the substances and structures of which we are made. The Feldenkrais Method is a way of looking behind phenomena, behind substances and structures, behind symptoms, at the functional relationships among them all. Becoming aware of one's process, of the way actions and things influence one another, of the way they form a larger whole by working together-in short, becoming aware of our organization-is the key to improvement. Another core understanding: our organization is not random. Our development follows a certain intrinsic order, an inner hierarchy of development in space and time. . . . there is a learning in which you have no say whatsoever and that learning is latent in the natural laws which have produced our brain and our nervous system and our body and our muscles. These laws are included in the cosmic - 99 -

laws of the universe. They are so precise and so sequential that you have no say about the order you will learn them in. They must be learned in that order; if not, you will not develop as a normal human being. 6 And it is in this organization, natural and cosmic at the same time, that we will find one of the deepest commonalities between Jewish mystical thinking and the Feldenkrais Method . In the Zohar, the core text of Jewish mysticism, we find the following description of intrinsic order; you could call it deep ecology: Whoever goes deeply into the Torah keeps the world in motion and places each part in the optimal circumstance to carry out its function. Likewise, there is no limb in the human body which doesn't have its own correlate in the world at large. And as the human body is composed of limbs and joints in various ranks, which effect one another back and forth and which form an organism, thus is it also in the world: all creatures are arranged like limbs, which stand in a hierarchical relationship to one another, which, when they are well organized, they form in a precise sense an organism. And everything is organized according to the fundamental image of the Torah, as the Torah itself is composed entirely of limbs and joints that stand in a hierarchical relationship to one another, which, when they are well organized, form a single organism. 7 Though the language may sound archaic, the writer's interest is clear. He is not so much concerned with limbs and joints per se, but with the underlying organization that they make manifest. As discussed in chapter 2, the word Torah must be understood here as a lot more than a book. In the way it is used in this passage it is very close to the Buddhist term dharma, the way things are, and the way of life that most accords with the way things are, and the teaching that leads to it. It is the first manifestation of the same principle of unity and organization that is found throughout creation. Adin Steinsaltz writes, "It [Torah] is not ... a static chart of things as they are but a dynamic plan of the ever-changing world .. . " 8

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Feldenkrais was quite explicit about this principle of organization, as distinct from the manifestation of organization. It does not exist, he says, but he relies on it! Like the the Kabbalistic "tree of life," which is a sort of distillation of Torah, it is not a map of things, but a map of process. It tells him when each part is or is not "in the optimal circumstance to carry out its function ." If a Feldenkrais training is successful, each student leaves with just such a map that is not a map: I have formed in my imagination an ideal human brain and function. Ideal means non-existent ... . . . the advantage of such a subterfuge is very considerable, for at a glance you can place [the] "function" of the real man in comparison with the image in your mind and obtain very useful concrete information. Without my ideal image I am at a loss to know what to look for; each function grades itself when compared with an idealized function, and although this is not a measure (as from a scientific instrument) it is still a mental auxiliary of the greatest value to me. It has guided my inquiry in neurology, physiology, evolution theory, and so forth, enabling me to find the pertinent facts which are dispersed in an ocean of knowledge and intelligence ... 9

I am going to bring in another quote from Moshe about this, because it is central to this chapter. Moshe is talking here about a non-verbal internal map of functions, which can be carried over from one discipline to the other : Learning to think in patterns of relationships , in sensations divorced from the fixity of words, allows us to find hidden resources and the ability to make new patterns, to carry over patterns of relationship from one discipline to another. 10

Moshe is talking about an internal map of functions, and his ancestors were talking about an internal map of functions. In both frames of reference-that is, in Feldenkrais's teachings and in Hasidism-a map of "patterns of relationship" frames the mind/body paradox as a dynamic process.

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As we saw in the previous chapters, before the advent of Hasidism there was a tendency among the pious to reject the material world in favour of the spiritual. One of the innovations of Hasidism was to reject this rejection. The Ba'al Shem Tov essentially declared a new regime in the relationship between the material and the spiritual by bringing forward a teaching known as "corporeal worship," or "service (of God) through materiality." With this teaching, the BeShT declares an end to the war between body and soul. Samuel Dresner, in his study of Hasidic thinking, The Zaddik, paraphrases it very elegantly . His source is Rabbi Ya'akov Yosef, a friend of Pinchas of Koretz and the first to actually put the wisdom of the BeShT in a book. Within a single man, the soul should not act arrogantly toward the body . . . for the soul descends into this world in order to perform the commandments in a perfect manner by means of the bodily limbs . Thus, all the more so, the body should not act arrogantly toward the soul . . . for when the soul is divided from the body, the body putrefies ... 11

Now the soul is not the brain and the brain is not the soul-or is it? Perhaps in this area we have bumped into the paradox of paradoxes. According to Hasidic teachings, the principal place where the soul manifests itself in the body is the brain. (We will look into the Hasidic view of the brain in greater depth in chapter 18). For Feldenkrais, the term "soul" is an unhelpful abstraction, the very sort of thing he is studiously trying to avoid with his Method. For the purposes of this chapter, let's bridge the gap between the abstract and the concrete and, purely for the sake of a comparison between two ways of thinking, assume a rough equivalence of brain and soul. If we do this, certain common patterns emerge. For example, in the following quote, Feldenkrais appears to be saying the same thing as Pinchas's friend Rabbi Ya'akov Yosef, cited above, in his own characteristically blunt way: .. . without a brain, the body wouldn't be worth anything. Anaesthetize your brain, and you will see what is your body is worth. 12

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To review: it is the early 18th century, and the Ba'al Shem Tov has declared that it is counterproductive to separate soul and body. Our real work, he says, is not in retreat from the material world, but right in the middle of it. The early Hasidic masters taught that our job is to worship God through our natural impulses. This means we have to stay involved in concrete reality. This does not mean that the goal is not a spiritual one. But the four worlds of the Kabbalah-which are found in the individual as spiritual world, intellectual world, emotional world and world of action (as well as countless other ways)-are not in any way separate from one another. One Hasidic Rebbe said it like this: "This is the secret of the unity of God: no matter where I take hold of a shred of it, I hold the whole of it. 1113 It follows, according to Kabbalistic reasoning, that if one "takes hold of a shred of" unity in the "world of action," one gains access to the subtler realms, as well. The pre-eminence of action as a means of changing the inner life did not enter Judaism through Hasidism. It was there all the time, but, like a number of older ideas, it was brought to the fore by Hasidism. We may recall here the 13th-century Book of Education (Sefer ha-chinuch), mentioned in the Preface, where it is written: "It is through actions that the heart is transformed." And some teachers trace the source for this teaching right back to the Book of Exodus (24:7), where Moses brings the Law to the Israelites gathered at the foot of the mountain, and they say: "We will do and we will hear." Over the centuries this curious formulation has received a lot of attention. Why doesn't it say: "We will hear and we will do"? The Kotzker Rebbe (d. 1859) interpreted it this way: "It is with our doing that we grasp." With only a slight nudge, this teaching comes out as "We become aware through movement." The Hasidic attitude toward the material world is paradoxical, to be sure. This palpable world, which is the end result of the whole process of creation, is also the most limited, subject to the most laws, and the furthest from the realm of pure possibility. It is not heaven, but it is our very own doorway to heaven. It is also not hedonism, but it is a long way from the previous attitude of demonizing the physical. It is echoed in the Buddhist teaching that it is only in a human incarnation that one can transcend incarnation. - 103 -

A close reading shows that Feldenkrais's own thoughts about body and mind follow an arc of logic similar to that of the Hasidic approach to body and soul, right down to the paradoxical relation to the physical world. Here is the arc: First, body and mind are one, and it is counterproductive to separate them : "I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning." 14 Second, there are four components of experience and they constantly affect one another. Feldenkrais writes: Four components make up the waking state: sensation, feeling, thought, and movement. Each one serves as a basis for a whole series of methods of corrections ... Talking about separate components is an abstraction ... The exclusion of any one of the four components is justified only in speech; in reality, not a moment passes in the waking state in which all man's capacities are not employed together ... It follows ... that detailed attention to any of these components will influence the others, hence the whole person. 15 Third, our best access for working with these four components is through the most concrete manifestation of their unity, namely, "the action system": The advantage of approaching the unity of mental and muscular life through the body lies in the fact that the muscle expression is simpler because it is concrete and easier to locate. It is also incomparably easier to make a person aware of what is happening in the body, therefore the body approach yields faster and more direct results. On acting on the significant parts of the body, such as the eyes, the neck, the breath, or the pelvis, it is easy to effect striking changes of mood on the spot .16 "It is with our doing that we grasp," indeed. For both the Hasid and the Feldenkrais student, conscious action is the doorway to improvement. The Hasid hopes, through the joyful observance of good deeds in the "world of action," to bring unity in all the four worlds (action, emotion, intellect, spirit). As Pinchas taught, "When a man makes such and such a motion with his hand, - 104 -

thus it is done in all the worlds." 17 In like manner, according to Moshe's teaching, movement is not the ultimate goal: "I use the movements only to improve the process of self-organization." 18 Finally, self-knowledge through awareness is the goal of re-education . As we become aware of what we are doing in fact, and not what we say or think we are doing, the way to improvement is wide open to us. 19 "Awareness Through Movement" lessons are done, not to perfect the movement, but to facilitate awareness of the whole system-action, feeling, thought, and sensation-and thereby to open the way to improvement. As Moshe said , quoted above, "It follows ... that detailed attention to any of these components will influence the others, hence the whole person ." In the "Torah" of Pinchas of Koretz, we achieve unity by enhancing our awareness. In the following passage, Pinchas is teaching a form of contemplation. See if you can follow his Kabbalistic logic through the apparent complexity of this teaching (I have simplified the language as much as I dare without distorting the sense of it): When a man engages in the world of action and pays attention to every matter, such as whether to walk or not to walk, and how to sit, and whether to turn his face this way or that, he is unifying the [divine name corresponding to the] world of action. And when he pays attention to each utterance, whether to speak or not to speak, he is unifying the [divine name corresponding to the] world of formation . And when he keeps watch on himself with regard to his thoughts , the unification of the [divine name corresponding to the] world of creation is accomplished . And thus we arrive at the unification of the sacred pair, the masculine and the feminine principle [as represented by the union of the sefirot malchut and yesod].1120 Feldenkrais sums up the relationship between awareness and unity with the following story, leaving no doubt that his own vision encompasses far more than the correction of inefficient movement. - 105 -

In the esoteric schools of thought a Tibetan parable is told . According to the story, a man without awareness is like a carriage whose passengers are the desires, with the muscles for horses, while the carriage itself is the skeleton. Awareness is the sleeping coachman. As long as the coachman remains asleep the carriage will be dragged aimlessly here and there. Each passenger seeks a different destination and the horses pull different ways. But when the coachman is wide awake and holds the reins the horses will pull the carriage and bring every passenger to his proper destination. In those moments when awareness succeeds in being at one with feeling , senses, movement, and thought, the carriage will speed along on the right road. Then man can make discoveries, invent, create, innovate , and "know." He grasps that his small world and the great world around are but one and that in this unity he is no longer alone. 2 1

To sum up, Moshe's Method contains very broad and deep assumptions regarding inner organization, awareness, and the work of unification, and remarkably similar assumptions can also be found in the teachings of Feldenkrais's Hasidic forebears. 1 2

Ruthy Alon, personal communication, 12/06/03. Moshe Feldenkrais,"Learn to Learn" http :// www.feldenkrais-wien .at/

article-1 .htm.

Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious (Cupertino : Meta Publications, 1981) 99. 4 Feldenkrais, 29. 5 Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement (New York:Harper Collins, 1972) 33. 6 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious (Cupertino: Meta Publications, 1981) 116-117. 7 Zohar 1:135a; this rendition is based on a number of diverse translations . 8 Adin Steinsaltz, The Thirteen Petalled Rose: A Discourse on the Essenceof Jewish Existence and Belief (New York:Basic Books, 2006) 66. 9 Feldenkrais, 100-101. w Feldenkrais, 35. 11 Samuel H. Dresner, The Zaddik (Northvale: Aronson, 1994) 138. 12 Moshe Feldenkrais, Recording of Dallas workshop, 1981. 13 Martin Buber, ed. (0. Marx, trans .), Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) 54. 3

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14 Moshe Feldenkrais, "Mind and Body," in Systematics: The Journ al of the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences,

Vol. 2, No. 1, June 1964. [Excerpted on the website of the International Feldenkrais Federation: http:/ /fe ldenkrais-method .org/e n/node/338 .] 15 Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement (New York: Harper Collins, 1972) 31-32. 16 Moshe Feldenkrais, "Mind and Body," op. cit. 17 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, Midrash Pinchas ha-shalem (Ashdod: Yishlim, 2001) 1:10 (D.K., trans. ). 18 Amherst Training Video, June 15, 1980 (International Feldenkrais Federation). 19 Moshe Feldenkrais, "Mind and Body," op. cit. 20 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz,_1:17 (D.K., trans.). 21 Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement (New York: Harper Collins, 1972) 54.

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Chapter 14 Furth er Resonances Some resonances are less obvious than others. Pinchas of Koretz spoke often of the paired Kabbalistic notions of the energy of expansion, or direct light (in Hebrew, or yashar) and the energy of contraction, or reflected light (in Hebrew, or chozer). These two qualities are found in all actions, and are represented on the two sides of the diagram of the "tree" of the sefirot. These concepts were part of Pinchas's specialist vocabulary, and you won't hear much about them from Feldenkrais . On the other hand, you won't hear Pinchas talking much about the interaction of the paired muscle groups in the arm and the neural control mechanisms behind it. Nevertheless, when we hear Pinchas say something like this: "If you drop your hand, this is according to the principle of expansion . If you lift your hand, this is according to the principle of contraction, 111 it appears that he and his distant descendant were investigating the same phenomena with the tools at hand: on the one hand, the apparently abstract apparatus of the Kabbalah; on the other, the apparently concrete language of science. Another charming parallel, well concealed by the difference between religious and scientific language, is the notion that our actions create a non-manifest inner image, which becomes a determinant of our future life. In the Hasidic view, we build a "spiritual body" through the fulfillment of the mitzvot (religious obligations) in our physical body . The mitzvot form an organic unity, and the more we fulfil them, the more hidden connections we restore, and the more we "fill out" the organic unity of this other body. (And, says the tradition, this "spiritua l body" becomes our vehicle in the next world, when the "outer body" is finished and done with .) You won't find Moshe Feldenkrais talking about the afterlife and filling out the spiritual body by fulfilling anybody's commandments . On the other hand, you will find him saying that our actions create a self-image in the brain . This selfimage can be filled out and corrected, and the improved self- 109 -

image becomes the basis of improved action. A striking methodological parallel appears in the attitude toward the performance of simple acts. When one does a Feldenkrais lesson, one repeats an action many times, but this repetition is wasted if it becomes routine, and is done mindlessly . Each time a movement is done, there is an intention to do it with less effort, and more awareness of the use of the whole system. Z' ev ben Shimon Halevi, a modern Kabbalist, describes a similar attitude: To the Kabbalist, practice must never become routine. While he may outwardly perform exactly the same procedure as his co-religionists, he seeks to remain aware of the inner content of what he is doing in relation to himself, the universe and God. His intention, or Kavvanah [sic], is consciously directed , because he knows that what he is doing will have an effect on the whole of existence. He accepts the responsibility of will, and operates according to his knowledge of the upper Worlds, so that a simple ceremony becomes a focus for a Divine influx. 2

In the Feldenkrais Method, our field of action is the movements of daily life. We take these movements and we make little ceremonies out of them, i.e., spaces for enhanced mindfulness. We call them lessons. In a Feldenkrais lesson, a simple movement becomes an opportunity for insight into the organization of the entire system, and this includes one's connection to the environment (in Kabbalistic terminology, the universe). Yet another parallel is the functional relationship between a Rebbe and his Hasid, and vice versa. The Hasid is not exactly a client of the Rebbe, not exactly a disciple, but is in a relationship of guidance, based on the Rebbe's ability to "see" more of the Hasid than the Hasid can see of himself. The Rebbe does not have to be perfect, but if he is going to play the role, he needs to have some insight to share: Reb Moishe Kabriner once talked to a Hasid who said, "Reb Moishe, I know all about you-warts included-from way back. What do I have to believe about you so I could be a Hasid and you could be the Rebbe?" He said, "All you have - 110 -

to believe is that I'm a kletzel hecherfun dir, meaning that I'm -like the height of a tree stump-that I'm that much higher than you. That's all you need to believe."3 Thankfully, the Feldenkrais practitioner does not have to be perfect. All that is required for the student to benefit from the relationship is that the practitioner is sufficiently present for the student, aware enough of organization and skilled enough in communication to be able to help the student learn what she or he does not already know . The practitioner lends his/her experience and presence to the awareness of the student, amplifying it so the student sees more than he/she can see alone. In the archetype of a helping, healing, educational relationship which is not one of authority or manipulation or control, there is something of one system in the other. The Rebbe is not a priest, a policeman, or a parent, and neither is the practitioner. If the Rebbe's task is to assist the Hasid on a journey from fragmentation to wholeness, by virtue of what he has learned through his own inner work, the practitioner's job-working with the most concrete means available-is not so different. The job description is simple yet demanding: set your ego aside, be present, make connections. Anyone who has seen Moshe Feldenkrais work with a client one-to-one, whether in person or in a video, will testify to the fact that he was able to disengage from his public persona and the rough edges of his character, and offer to that client a remarkable quality of attention with immense kindness. A deep quiet settles in, one central nervous system links with another, and much happens in the space created. A number of his students have told me they received an enormous gift from him in the way he was able to see them in their fullness. One can also use the mirror of the Hasidic world to look at the way the practice of the Feldenkrais Method has shaped itself in the world. Hasidism does not exist without the relationship between the Rebbe and the Hasid. This is a direct relationship, a direct initiation. There is a direct transmission of authority to teach. And it goes without saying that direct contact plays a large part in the teaching, learning and transmission of the Feldenkrais Method. These are personal relationships, but they are not about the personality. - 111 -

You cannot become part of such a teaching lineage by attending university courses in Hasidism or Feldenkrais. In Hasidism, not so much at the beginning but increasingly so in later generations , the chain of transmission often ran through the family, or the extended family. (Though this is less often the case in the Feldenkrais world, there are a number of senior trainers whose primary "lineage-holder" comes from the trainer's own family.) In a lecture given in 1973, 4 Feldenkrais comments on the formality by which one rabbi recognizes and recommends the work of another. What is important in this form of transmission of authority is not that the first rabbi is entirely in agreement with the opinions and practices of the second, but that the one who gives his "seal of approval" vouches for the integrity, the judgement, the credibility of the other. Lineage is not about homogeneity of teaching, but about the integrity of the teachers. As part of a direct and continuous chain they are assumed to have access, through their own developed consciousness , to the core of the teachings. They are "certified" by the bestower of their lineage to teach this truth in any way that works. Though he does not dwell on this connection in his 1973 lecture, Feldenkrais implies that he himself stands in some way in the lineage of Pinchas of Koretz , which-even though Pinchas died over a century before Feldenkrais was born-is nevertheless a meaningful statement in the context of his tradition. From the Ba'al Shem Tov to this very day, where there have been great struggles within the Hasidic world, they have related to questions of lineage and authenticity, more than to nuances of teaching. And if we examine the way the Feldenkrais profession has developed, wide differences in understanding of the Method are tolerated, and where there have been struggles, they have been around questions of succession. Who is authorized to teach, and how, and who shall control this authorization? Perhaps we may find greater clarity in these questions, as well, by reflecting on the ancestral pattern. Tradition is innately conservative . The very qualities which allow it to carry values through the centuries can be experienced as confining, unyielding, and discouraging to spontaneity and innovation . Although Hasidism itself represented a breakthrough of spontaneity in the context of its - 112 -

times, even the most exciting breakthrough will eventually become wallpaper to its children's children's children. To become what Moshe would call "mature," every individual must in some way be able to pass beyond a collective or received mentality into a realm of choice. For his own compelling reasons, Moshe Feldenkrais stepped resolutely out of the behavioural constraints of his tradition, its accretions of obligations, exclusions, rituals, beliefs, customs and taboos; these were not for him. That said, as I hope the foregoing chapters have demonstrated, it would be a mistake to view Moshe's own choices in isolation from their context-the incalculable social, political, and economic changes under way all around him. At the time he was leaving his family, his town, and the bounds of the collective, the very ground was moving out from under the feet of Eastern European Jewry . The immediate task as Moshe saw it was survival-to do what needed to be done-and we are only able to look back at this period through the haze of catastrophes and wonders through which Moshe and some of his peers somehow made their way. What endures through massive change-personal and historical-are the intangibles that travel within us, with or without a passport, with or without the appropriate costume, and whether or not we had meant to take them along. Moshe took with him on his enormous journey values, models, stories, inspirations, thinking skills and attitudes that had been refined for centuries and centuries in the crucible of a distinct tradition. We should not be surprised to find their echo in what he gave to the world.

1 Martin Buber, ed., (0. Marx, trans.), Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) 122 (D.K. paraphrase). 2 Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi, Kabbalah: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge (New

York: Thames and Hudson , 1979) 57. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Wrapped in a Holy Flame: Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003) 12. 4 Moshe Feldenkrais with El Teatro Campesino and Peter Brook's International Centre of Theatre Research, San Juan Bautista, 1973 (CD) (Paris, International Feldenkrais Federation, 1994). 3

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Chapter

15

Langu age Education determines one's language and establishes a pattern of concepts and reactions common to a specific society. These concepts and reactions will vary according to the environment into which a person is born; they are not characteristic of mankind as a species, but only of certain groups or individuals. 1 - Moshe Feldenkrais Many things are not obvious. Most psychotherapies use speech to get to unconscious, forgotten, early experience . Yet feelings go on in ourselves long before speech is learned. Some pay attention not to what is said but to how it is said. Doing this enables one to find the intentions behind the structure of the phrasing, so that one can get to the feelings that dictated the particular way of phrasing. In short , how one says what one does is at least as important as what one says.2 - Moshe Feldenkrais

I. Words and Letters It would be hard to find a cultural milieu where the word

itself is more important than in the traditional Jewish milieu. In Hasidic communities, at the age of three, a boy is given pastries in the shape of Hebrew letters, dipped in honey, to eat; and then he begins the long journey toward multi-level and multilingual literacy . The letters themselves are seen as the building blocks of creation-not as representing reality, but as building blocks of reality itself. They are archetypes, repositories of significance; like DNA, they are bearers of anciently encoded truths. Each letter has a story to tell, a hieroglyphic dimension, a numeric dimension, as well as a particular sound. The scroll of the Torah can be read on the most superficial level as a succession of stories; but on the level of the letters, it is a description of the innermost workings of creation. As the Torah is considered to be divinely inspired, there are no accidents in the choice of words. Meanings and stories flow out of each word, and bring with them the accumulated nuances attached to them by generations and generations of - 115 -

scholars . Deconstructing language is an imperative of religious scholarship, and, among the students of the Torah, who are almost always multilingual, it is a continuous sport. Words have intrinsic power, and in the old country a ba'al shem, a master of names, was the local expert in the "practical Kabbalah." He was the one you called if you wanted to use especially powerful words in especially powerful ways. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi explains: God created the world with words, and if we knew the right words, we cou ld uncreate things, we could shift things. Many of the notions that came in Kabbalah and practical Kabbalah had to do with finding the formula so that you could change the pattern. The word abracadabra (in Aramaic, ibra k'dibra), "created as it was spoken." Or take the expression "hocus pocus." It comes from the priest holding up the wafer and saying, "Hoc est enim corpus meum-This is my body." Through that act, "hocus pocus," the wafer is no longer bread. 3

And it would be difficult to find a body/mind modality that pays more attention to the use of language than the Feldenkrais Method. As we seek a more precise and accurate inner image of movement, one that corresponds to the way the body/mind is put together, it is imperative that we use language with precision and accuracy. By so doing, we can side-step habitual responses to habitual language, "change the pattern," and enter the realm of learning. When I was a practitioner-in-training, I attended a couple of training segments in Germany. Like all trainees, we watched videos of Moshe teaching in Amherst. Some of my German friends-though their English was more than adequate-were having a hard time understanding what Moshe was up to. They understood his words, but not his humour, not his irony, not his provocations. I was intrigued, as Moshe's way of expressing himself seemed so transparent to me, and yet I was as new to the Method as they were. You'd think it would have been simple, no? Moshe, not a native English speaker, was speaking in English, and my friends, not native English speakers, were listening in English . But Moshe's childhood language was Yiddish, and my friends - 116 -

grew up in German, and the really big difference between Yiddish and German is the thinking! Each language contains a set of assumptions . My German is not good enough to know all the assumptions that are built into it, but there is certainly some amount of deference there. Yiddish, on other hand, which arose in a German-speaking milieu precisely as a vehicle for a countercultural world view, assumes that its speakers and listeners have been educated to deconstruct what is written or said. It is count er-deferential. So much so, in fact, that Yiddish is a language in which you can say the opposite of what you mean in order to say what you mean with moreemphasis! A story: a Yiddish-speaking Jew is falsely accused of murder and hauled before the court. The prosecuting attorney says: "You killed that man!" The Jew says, with varying degrees of ironic emphasis : "Me? I killed that man!? I killed that man!? I killed that man!?" And, of course, on the strength of his triple confession , he is shot. Three times. Some are perplexed by Moshe's more extreme utterances in the middle of a lesson , such as: "If you only do it on the right, the spine is ruined for the entire life. Nothing will help it." 4 or, "Don't breathe!" or "Go ahead, break your arm!" What he means, of course, is: please take good care of yourself . And his intention is to empower you to do so even when no one is saying nice things to you.

II. niarB eht dna ycaretiL Reading is movement. The words move across the page and the eyes follow the words: Hebrew goes from right to left, as do Yiddish and Aramaic, while Russian and Polish go the other way 'round. The movements of the eyes, head, spine, etc., and thus the way the brain is mobilized, are different according to the direction in which you read. If you read in two different languages, you have at least two ways of thinking, and you are at least subconsciously aware that it is legitimate to view things in two different ways . How much more so if you read in snoitcerid tnereffid owt.

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III. Self-translation Among the papers left in Moshe's estate was a curious little school exercise book, containing twenty-four autobiographical vignettes . They were written (dated) when Moshe was a month short of eleven years old . He was living at the time in Baranovich, and his family and his community, his city and his empire, were all in crisis. The situation is revealed through these vignettes in the remarkably honest, transparent and surprising elegant writing of a gifted child; one feels in them both the clear-eyed innocence of childhood and the looming trauma that ended it.* These vignettes are obviously an important source for any biograph y of Moshe, but not so much for the historical facts they contain as for their emotional impact, a snapshot of the inner world of a child prodigy in a dangerous time. They also reveal the extent to which the man-with his courage and self-confidence, bluster mingled with sweetness, and his capacity to observe himself, others, and the natural world, and to articulate what he saw-was already present in the boy. For our inquiry into unexamined influences on Moshe's teachings, however, the childhood writings have yet another clue to offer: namely , little Moshe was not writing in the language he spoke at home, but in a language which almost no one in his day could speak: Hebrew . This has a number of implications for our inquiry into the circumstances of Moshe's childhood, and for the evolution of the Method, as well. For Moshe and his generation of pioneers-which includes several of the founding generation of Feldenkrais teachers-were making a rather radical linguistic leap. Put yourself in little Moshe's shoes, Imagine yourself back in school, sitting on your hard wooden bench, with a coal fire burning in the stove, writing last night's dream in Latin. Moreover, as we have discussed above, Moshe's Hebrew education was part of a communal response to the collective crisis: he and his peers were preparing, whether consciously or unconsciously, to abandon their parents, community, and pretty much their whole reality, travel to an unknown land, and build a new society-and all this in a language in which the words (and concepts) for such things as toothbrush, tomato, fried egg, tractor, transmission, self-defense , high- 118 -

blood pressure, athlete's foot, apartment block, agrarian socialism-not to mention central nervous system-had to be creatively reconstructed from old roots . They were not just learning a language. The Zionist program was about collective redemption, and this required collective re-invention. The case of little Moshe and his classmates is fascinating and, in modern history , unique . Here a community startsrelatively suddenly-to speak a dead language, and, moreover, succeeds! This is a remarkable achievement, and well-studied ; yet there are some less-studied implications which bear our consideration.

IV. Mother Tongue, Father Tongue Although a revival of Hebrew as a written language was underway throughout the 19th century, the language had almost no native speakers when Feldenkrais was born! The "father" of Modern Hebrew (Eliezer Ben-Yehuda), did not speak the language as a child' his son Ben-Zion (born 1882), was the first child brought up in Modern Hebrew . No other language was permitted in the Ben-Yehuda household in Jerusalem, and little Ben-Zion was not allowed to play with others, lest he be exposed to other languages. Legend has it that this unfortunate/fortunate child's first words-not spoken until the age of four-were evoked by hearing his father berate his mother for singing a Russian lullaby to her son. Said the child: "Father,no!" You will not be surprised to hear that there was a lively "gender politics" around the development of Modern Hebrew.** As the story of little Ben-Zion shows , Modern Hebrew could hardly be described as a "mother tongue" when there were no mothers who spoke it! And while the young Moshe Feldenkrais may have spoken Hebrew with his comrades at their construction sites in Tel Aviv, the letters that he wrote to his mother were in Yiddish. In the early years of the Zionist enterprise , as the campaign to establish a new national language strove to attain critical mass , there was considerable repression of Yiddish . Sometimes this occurred by shaming, sometimes more forcefully. The campaign was ultimately successful, and the shadow of its success was a certain severance of roots , an implied critique of all that had been . Thus a - 119 -

culture shifted from mother-tongue to "father-tongue," the obvious became a little bit more elusive.

and

V. "The Medium is the Message" We acquire speech and mobility simultaneously. We learn to creep, to crawl, to stand and walk, and to represent our movement repertoire to ourselves in our first language, our "mother tongue." One could go so far as to say that each of us speaks a particular movement dialect. Each of us moves and speaks in very specific, culturally-determined and idiosyncratic ways. If you were doing psychotherapy with a multilingual client, you would likely have more immediate access to early memories and feelings-and movement patterns-through the "native" language than through, for example, Latin . . . and that, even if both you and your client had learned Latin reallywell. To my knowledge, there is only one document from Moshe's childhood in his mother tongue. It is a letter he wrote-unsurprisingly-to his mother, from Tel Aviv, when he was sixteen years old. It is full of feeling : mother-son, father-son, and sibling feeling, Not the slightest bit formal. By comparison, the school notebook, written in Hebrew five or six years earlier, comes across almost preternaturally formal, self-aware and mature. The other document that we have about Feldenkrais's childhood is the interview, conducted in English, that was video-taped when Moshe was seventy-seven years old. In the brief portion where tells stories he heard when he was eleven, i.e ., approximately the same age as when he wrote the Hebrew vignettes, he tends to fall into Yiddish inflection. Moreover, there is a lot of softness around the details. Is it not possible that, after decades of translating oneself into one new language after another, one's childhood memories wear more veils than usual? What could one have learned from interviewing this man in Yiddish! And if this image makes you laugh, could it be because of an intuitive tickle of a greater possibility of self-revelation?

VI. Polyglotism and the Feldenkrais Method By the time of his bar mitzvah (age thirteen), Moshe was using at least four languages . At home he spoke Yiddish, at - 120 -

school, Hebrew. In the synagogue, prayers were in Hebrew and Aramaic. He would have learned Russian, as it was the official language of the regime, and his mother was fond of Russian literature. Meanwhile, in the market place, he would have heard Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, and likely other tongues. After he left Baranovichi he learned to speak French, English and German. And if you hunt around for a bit you can find recordings of him teaching in four different languages. This may sound exceptional, but among Moshe's generation, it wasn't . At the Alexander Yanai Street studio in Tel Aviv, where the Method was first taught to large groups, in the 1950's, the language of instruction-Hebrew-was one which neither Moshe nor most of his students had spoken or heard in their infancy. Moreover, as we have noted above, and as the Alexander Yanai transcripts document, the Hebrew language itself was fairly new at this, too. Thus it is quite likely that many of those who were lying on that floor were hearing in Hebrew, but moving, feeling, and thinking in Yiddish, German, Russian, Rumanian, Polish, French, Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, and so forth. Of course, the Feldenkrais work was new and unfamiliar, but that was not the only cause for confusion, as the following short excerpt from the Alexander Yanai recordings will demonstrate: [Lift] only the shikhmah (shoulder blade). Do not tum the body. Lift the shikhmah. Shikhmah is 16potke in Yiddish, Japatka in Russian, homoplate in French, Schulterblatt (German), shoulder blade (English). There, now you don 't have any more excuses. - Alexander Yanai Lesson #124, "Working with the Dominant Hand ." translation D.K. Interestingly for our discussion in this chapter: having noticed confusion among his students, Dr. Feldenkrais first went to the Yiddish word. However, the English transcript/translation published by the IFF mentions only the French, Russian, and German translations. As discussed above, this is how the obvious becomes elusive.

"Come on! Let's go down there and confuse their language , so that they won't understand each other's speech." - From the story of the Tower of Babel, Genesis, 11:7 (International Standard Version trans.) - 121 -

Small wonder that Moshe was occasionally frustrated at his students for not quite getting what he was saying! Small wonder that each one heard something different! Small wonder, for that matter, that there are so many different understandings of what Moshe was saying! The Feldenkrais Method emerged in the sounds of a freshly resurrected language in the midst of a polyglot culture.

VII. Beyond Words In one way, all this talk about language is beside the point. I am told that Feldenkrais encouraged students in his trainings to remain silent for a while after a movement lesson, so that the direct experience could take root in them, unmediated, unfiltered, undistorted, unconstrained by the girdle that a word puts on a sensation. And yet-because, after all, this is a paradoxical path-the conscious use of language is essential to us; this is how we teach a class. To use language to point beyond language is the poet's craft, and in this way our work has much in common with poetry. And we can assume that Feldenkrais intuited as much himself, as the late Franz Wurm, Feldenkrais' close friend and a brilliant poet and translator, was the man Moshe chose to introduce his work to the German-speaking world. Franz Wurm was, perhaps better than anyone else, able to express the paradoxical role of language in the Feldenkrais work. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Franz Wurm by Yves Kugelmann, done in Zurich in 2006 (my translation): [Y.K.} "You have directed the FeldenkraisInstitute [in Switzerland] for decades,were a good friend of Feldenkraisand one of the few to have experiencedthe development of the Method. Is it not contradictory***when a poet deals with movement, rather than language? [F.W.) "Not really. For in movement we find the boundary between what can be said in words, and what is revealed by going through them to the other side. Nonverbal work is ultimately a work with language." ...

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"Was Moshe Feldenkrais,through his relationshipwith you, perhaps a bit influencedthroughyour [way with] language?And your languageperhaps[influenceda bit] by movement?" "This was mutual, yes. This showed up very strongly in the translation of his books, for I came up with masses of questions [for him], in order to be completely certain and precise with the translation ... And here, incidentally, the question of origin pops up again, for this preoccupation with the unity of body and mind is something that Kurt Marti [Swiss theologian and poet] diagnosed in my poetry, calling it a sort of Jewish gnosticism." 5

1

M.F., Awareness through Movement (New York: Harper Collins, 1972) 3. M.F., The Elusive Obvious (Cupertino: Meta Publications , 1981) 145. 3 Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Wrapped in a Holy Flame: Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003) 21. 4 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Feldenkrais Method®: Awareness Through Movement®: Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais at Alexander Yanai (Paris: International Feldenkrais Federation, 2004) Vol. Xl:A, lesson no. 516, p. 3519 . 5 Interview of Franz Wurm by Yves Kugelmann (published originally in 2006 and , republished , in 2010, on the occasion of Franz Wurm's passing) in TACHLES, Das judische Wochenmagazin, Zurich, 22 October , 2010 . No. 42. 2

* [Although this "memoir" has not yet been published in English (full disclosure: I have been in involved in the translation), it is available in the original language, and in a German edition as Schulheft: Eine Spurensuche (Graz: Feldenkrais Roots, 2011 ). ** In the same year that little Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda blurted out the first sentence spoken by a monolingual child in Modern Hebrew , his father wrote: "The Hebrew language will go from the synagogue to the house of study, and from the house of study to the school, and from the school it will come into the home and ... become a living language" [(Hatzvi, 1886). http://www .jewishvirtuallibrary .org/ jsource/biogra phy /ben_yehuda.h tml,] When one remembers that , in those days, the synagogue, house of study , and school-where Hebrew was the language of prayer and learning-were largely male domains , and that the home was the sole female domain in traditional communal life, the gender aspect of the so-called "language wars" (Hebrew vs. Yiddish ), that marked the early years of the Zionist enterprise, comes into relief. For a full discussion of the sexual politics of Hebrew and Yiddish, see A Marriage Made in Heaven, by Naomi Seidman. *** Here the interviewer uses the German word paradox, which literally means paradoxical, but it is clear from the context and the response that what is intended is "contradictory ."

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Chapter 16 Moshe Speaks Everything new must have its roots in what was before. 1 - Sigmund Freud

Dr. Feldenkrais often spoke of his connection with his background and with Pinchas of Koretz, in particular, in books, lectures, and personal exchanges.

Quoting Pinchas In a talk Moshe gave to El Teatro Campesino and Peter Brook's International Centre of Theatre Research, in 1973, 2 he takes the audience from Martin Buber to the Ba'al Shem Tov to Pinchas of Koretz, whom he identifies as his ancestor and namesake. And then he quotes, in Hebrew, a teaching from Pinchas on humility, and translates it as follows: "Who is the humble man? He who knows his value." Now, the fact that Moshe's parents named him after Pinchas makes it a plausible assumption that Pinchas's teachings were in the environment. Moshe's cousin, Hana Elter, confirms that they were often discussed around the family table.*

Echoing Pinchas In his book, The Case of Nora, 3 Moshe writes: "As the Hebrew saying puts it, 'To teach the young is like writing on paper; to teach the old is like writing on blotting paper."' The quote comes from a chapter of the Talmud known as The Ethics of the Fathers (IV:25), which is also found in the daily prayer book. The saying itself seems to be explaining how it is that adults learn with more difficulty than children; Moshe uses it in his discussion of a concrete way of revisiting with an adult the pathways of early learning. Some one hundred and ninety years previously, Pinchas of Koretz cited the same phrase: In the "Ethics of the Fathers" it is said: "If one learns as a child, what is it like: Like ink written on clean paper. If one learns as an old man, what is it like: Like ink written on blotting paper." It may be asked: "Why discourage the older - 125 -

man?" But the sentence may be understood thus: "One who learns as a child, namely as one who concentrates his thoughts on that which he is learning, and has no foreign thoughts at the time, is like ink written on clean paper; his learning will be engraved upon his mind, and in his heart. " Thus, even an old man may learn as a child, if he displays the necessary concentration. 4 Both Moshe and Pinchas are grappling with the same question: how can they help adults learn better? Was Moshe aware of Pinchas' teaching on the matter, or are they both dipping into the same well, and coming up with the same water?

"That chap takes care of me all the time." We have a number of testimonies, both anecdotal and on videotape, in which Moshe alludes to some sort of special relationship with Pinchas. Feldenkrais's authorized biographer, the late Mark Reese, wrote : "I recall Moshe, in several intimate teaching situations, smiling mischievously and invoking his ancestor as a secret resource, claiming that Pinchas had whispered something in his ear." 5 Ruthy Alon, one of Moshe's earliest students, says that such scenarios happened repeatedly: Moshe is asked by someone, "How did you come up with this Method?" And he replies, pointing heavenwards, "I had help up there." 6 Again, it was understood in the milieu that this was a reference to Pinchas. In the Amherst Training video of June 17, 1981, Moshe says of Pinchas : "That chap takes care of me all the time." In an article published on the web entitled Dancing Together Instead of Treatment, Feldenkrais trainer Carl Ginsburg muses about the same question we are exploring in this book. There he reports yet another instance of Moshe talking directly to Pinchas before his students: "One day when he was teaching in Amherst he looks up to heaven and spoke to his ancestor Pinhas [sic] of Koretz, "'Pinkas,' [sic] he asked, 'how would you answer?'" 7 What are we to make of Moshe's conversations with his invisible friend? In the culture in which Moshe was raised, it was not a big deal to speak of a deceased sage whispering in your ear . The - 126 -

BeShT himself is reputed to have been initiated in his wisdom by an ancient master named Achiyah Ha-Shiloni. After years in the forests learning from this presence, the Ba'al Shem Tov returned to town and began to teach. And then, voila, Hasidism happened. On the other hand, as some have suggested to me, Moshe could just be playing with us here. But this just begs the question: If this is so, is it not interesting that Moshe would choose to play with Israeli, American, French and Chicano audiences in the name of a deceased Hasidic master? There is another option to consider, one in which Moshe and Pinchas again show up with the same script. You may recall the incident related in chapter 7, where someone asks Pinchas how he came up with a particular healing, and Pinchas answers in his curious Zen-like way, that he got it from a rooster. Is Pinchas Moshe's rooster? In any event, however you look at Moshe's special relationship with the very remarkable Pinchas, the cultural background offers us a little more depth of field.

Moshe cites the Sages Moshe's second published book (1929) concerned Emil of autosuggestion. This was long before the Feldenkrais Method saw the light of day, but there are elements of Coue that carry through, especially the primacy of the imagination over the will as a tool for self-improvement . Moshe wrote a little commentary to follow his translation; the concluding chapter carries the rather resonant Hebrew title sof ma 'aseh b'machshavah techilah. This phrase comes from a Kabbalistic hymn sung to greet the "Sabbath Queen, the shechinah, the feminine face of God, on the eve of the Sabbath. The verse can be read in many ways at many levels. Most literally, referring to the Sabbath, it says She is the end point, the last deed (the last thing to be created in the sequence of Creation), but intended from the very beginning. A Kabbalist might nudge this a bit further, suggesting that our reunion with the Sabbath Queen is the very purpose of Creation. The phrase could also be rendered in English as something like "What manifests (i.e., the outcome) was contained in thought at the very beginning." Moshe's choice of these four Hebrew Cow~'s method

11

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words as a chapter title suggests that he heard in them some resonance with the emerging body/mind science in which Coue was one of his models.** In his commentary ,8 Moshe says that there is really nothing new about autosuggestion . "Almost all the means that we are using were already known to our ancestors and they were already putting them to use." He goes on to talk about prayer, and how it is pure autosuggestion: a prayer speaks only of the desired outcome , and not of its opposite. "It's enough to leaf through the Bible and we will find confirmation of what we are talking about everywhere . . . As for the optimal time to practice autosuggestion, this was also known ... " Moshe cites chapter and verse from a couple of medieval sages: Rabbenu Yona (13th-century Italy) and Nachmanides (13th-century Catalonia). He quotes Sa'adia Gaon (10th-century Egypt) on the importance of the proper intention in prayer. And he cites the Talmud, to the effect that prayer is better than good deeds, because prayer purifies the soul itself.

Moshe on Hasidism and Paradox Russell Delman, a Feldenkrais trainer who specializes in the relationship between the Feldenkrais Method and Zen meditation, reported the following conversation, in Tel Aviv, in 1982 or 1983, when Moshe was just beginning to recover from his stroke . Russell and Moshe were discussing Zen. Moshe said: "If I didn't have my own teaching, I would be most attracted to that tradition." Russell replied, "Why, Moshe?" Moshe responded, "Because they understand paradox. And the Hasidim also have this same understanding. Everyone else wants to be on one side [of a paradox] .119

"I like this guy, he thinks like me." In following story, Moshe acknowledges an affinity between his own way of thinking and that of the early Hasidim . The story was told to me by Feldenkrais trainer Robbie Ofir. 10 The year was 1975, the place was San Francisco, and a former Israeli jet pilot, Boaz Lerner, wanted to join the San Francisco Feldenkrais training as it was entering its third year. Feldenkrais was reluctant to admit him. After all, the training - 128 -

was well underway. Boaz told Moshe: "If I can demonstrate to you that I can do origami with my toes, will you let me in?" Moshe agreed to the test . Lerner sat on the floor, took a sheet of paper and folded the paper into an origami sculpture using only his feet and toes . Moshe was very impressed, and Lerner joined the training. Now, at that time, as it turns out, Lerner was on the way to becoming an observant Hasidic Jew, and he was studying with the Chabad outreach people in San Francisco . The Chabad course of study always includes Tanya; it was written by their founder, after all. One struggles through it the same way a Feldenkrais student struggles through Body and Mature Behaviour; it is not easy, but it's the founder's thinking, cover to cover . Lerner was studying Tanya, and one day he showed the book to Feldenkrais. Moshe took the book, looked through it, and said: "I like this guy, he thinks like me." There is no indication in this story that would tell us whether Moshe knew, or noticed, that the book had originally been published in the town of his birth-and as likely as not the publisher was an ancestor of his!

The Autobiographical Video On June 14, 1981, in the second year of the Amherst training, Moshe faced a video camera and, for three hours, talked about the course of his life, from birth up until his meeting in Paris with the founder of Judo. 11 He chose to introduce the story of his life with a pair of Hasidic stories. You are invited to read an edited transcript of the first of these stories in Appendix II, and to share a peek beneath the surface of the narrative. (See also discussion on page 72.)

The Final Class Less than two months after that video was made, on August 5, 1981, Moshe taught what was to be his very last class in Amherst. Not long afterwards he had a stroke, and he was unable to return to the training. In the lesson of the "radiating hands," one sees a master in his fullness, inspired and engaged, conveying with love something of highest value to him. At the close of the session, these words fall from the lips of a man who has spent decades assembling the scientific - 129 -

infrastructure of his Method : "I am going to be religious for a moment: God bless us ." From the very beginning of his most technical work, Body and Mature Behaviour (1949), where Moshe announces that both the religious view and the scientific view are over-simplifications of the nature of man, right up until his very last class, Moshe is not going to let us off the hook of paradox.

"What humbles me ... " What are the mechanisms whereby one's early learnings manifest in one's mature work? Is this something we are aware of when it happens? This is a mystery, and one that Moshe touches upon in another intriguing statement in The Case of Nora: What humbles me is that I devised the method and found in the product of my own mind something that I did not put into it. Or maybe I did, but did not know that I was doing it . 12

* I am gratefu l for the storie s and reminiscences of Moshe's cousin Hana

Elter and her daughter , Elinor Silverstein, both Feldenkrais practitioners. ** The Kabbalistic hymn in question is known as l'chah dodi , and was

composed in the 16th century in Safed by Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz. The particular phrase under discussion, concerning thought and action, can be traced back to the school of Aristotle, and later found its way into both Islamic and Jewish wisdom traditions. See "'T he First in Thought is the Last in Action': The History of a Saying Attributed to Aristotle," in Samuel Miklos Stern (F. W. Zimmerman, ed.), Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Thought (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983) 234-252. 1

David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Schocken , 1958) vi. For connections between Jewish mysticism and psychology, readers ma y be interested in Edward Hoffman, The Way of Splendor: Jewish Mysticism and Modern Psychology (2nd edition) (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and Howard Polsky and Wozner, Yaella, Everyday Miracles: The Healing Wisdom of Hasidic Stories (Northvale: Aronson , 1989 ). 2 Moshe Feldenkrais with El Teatro Campesino and Peter Brook's International Cen tre of Theatre Research , San Juan Bautista , 1973 (CD) (Paris, International Feldenkrais Federation, 1994). 3 Moshe Feldenkrais , The Case of Nora : Body Awareness as Healing Therapy (Berkeley: Somatic Resources, 1977) 54. 4 Louis I. Newman, ed., The Hasidic Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1963 ) 44: 10. - 130 -

5

Mark Reese, "Feldenkrais: An Illustrated Biography and Resource. Chapter One: Eastern European Roots," The Feldenkrais]ournal, Spring 2004. No. 17, p. 6. 6 Moshe Feldenkrais, Amherst Training Video, June 17, 1981 (International Feldenkrais Federation: tape number 13). 7 Carl Ginsburg, "Dancing Together instead of Treatment-Martin Buber and Moshe Feldenkrais" http :// www.feldenkrais-wien.at / article.htm (Vienna: Feldenkrais® Studiengesellschaft) 8 C. Harry Brooks, (M. Feldenkrais, trans. and commentary) Ha-autosugestiyah (Tel Aviv: Alef, 1977) (Originally published by Binah, Tel Aviv, 1929.) 139-140. 9 Russell Delman, personal communication, November , 2006. 10 Robbie Ofir, personal communication, January, 2007. 11 Moshe Feldenkrais, autobiographical interview, unpublished video recording (Paris: International Feldenkrais Federation, 1981). 12 Moshe Feldenkrais, The Caseof Nora:BodyAwarenessas HealingTherapy (Berkeley: Somatic Resources, 1977) 53.

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Chapter 17 A Tale of Two Engineers ... one has come to think in certain ways through historical evolution that can be traced. What I take as my immediate certitudes, what I take as the givens, are not such, but have arisen through complex and fascinating journeys in the history of ideas ... * - Sonu Shamdasani, historian of psycholo gy

In 1930, Moshe Feldenkrais left British Mandate Palestine for Paris to study engineering. He got his first degree at the Ecole speciale des travaux publics-with a specialty in electrical and mechanical engineering-and in 1933 he went on to the Sorbonne to get a doctorate in physics. In 1933, another Yiddish-Hebrew-Russian-German-andFrench-speaking Ukrainian Jewish student showed up at the Sorbonne, and in 1935, went on to the Ecole speciale des travaux publics to get a degree in electrical engineering. When the war came to France, Feldenkrais escaped to England and the other man escaped to the south of France, and eventually, by way of Lisbon, to New York. During the war, Feldenkrais worked for the British Admiralty on antisubmarine warfare. The other man worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the design of submarines. The war over, both men went on to lead extraordinary lives-and far from the world of engineering. Neither had any children. Their lives were their work; their teachings were their offspring . Both of them profoundly influenced the lives of many thousands of people . Who was the second man? A clue: he is more famous, and far more controversial, than Feldenkrais. In 1950, Menachem Mendel Schneerson left engineering to succeed his late father-in-law (and distant cousin) as the head of the world-wide Hasidic movement known as Chabad Lubavitch . (Chabad is the movement, you may recall from the chapter on Slavuta, that was founded by Rabbi Schneur Zalman, way back at the end of the 18th century. Among contemporary Hasidic groups, it is probably the one most engaged with the nonHasidic world, and so the one you are most likely to encounter.)

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From appearances, one could hardly find two more different men : the bearded rabbi in the black hat, who made his name encouraging others to observe the minutiae of Jewish law and custom , and to do all in their power to speed the coming of the Messiah, and the bare-headed guy in the black belt, who made his name encouraging others to accept no authority whatsoever, not even his own, and not to look for salvation outside of themselves. In view of these rather fundamental differences, it can be instructive to look at what they did have in common. For example, both were specialists in making connections : circuitry, wiring, and the connectivity of unseen forces (not to mention large systems that move beneath the surface, like submarines). Both were descended from founders of the Hasidic movement in the late 18th century. And both of them devoted their lives, each in his own way, to re-establishing hidden connections within us, and to the recovery of an underlying wholeness, through mindfulness in action. And both of them hoped that their teachings would lead to fundamental changes on a planetary scale. Though they used different sets of metaphors, both engineers were somehow addressing the same conundrum, the multi-level nature of the human being. Feldenkrais wrote, as cited above : "I believe that the unity of mind and body is an objective reality. They are not just parts somehow related to each other, but an inseparable whole while functioning ... " 1 And Schneerson taught: "Each one of us is a microcosm of all Creation. The achievement of harmony between one's soul and one's material life, is the achievement of harmony between ... heaven and earth. "2 It seems extremely unlikely that these two ever met. Nevertheless, some ninety years after they both were born in the cradle of the old Hasidic world, Moshe's method somehow managed to find its way into the inner sanctum of a major Hasidic court. And now there are people from this branch of Hasidism who are involved with the Feldenkrais Method, as students and teachers. And here is how it began. Rabbi Schneerson's father-in-law, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn , managed to escape from the flames of Warsaw in 1940, with the help of the U.S. State Department-and, - 134 -

believe it or not, the head of the German military intelligence service, General Wilhelm Canaris. Yosef Yitzchak then devoted himself to rebuilding his shattered community from a new base in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, N.Y. At his passing, his sonin-law took up that work, and on his watch (forty-two years of it) Chabad became the most visible Hasidic group on the planet, with far-flung outreach programs. "The Rebbe," as Menachem Mendel Schneerson came to be called, had a remarkable impact on people, over the course of several generations, which continues long after his passing. In 1992, at the age of ninety, he had a stroke and was partially paralyzed; his staff was searching all over for an effective treatment . At this time, former San Francisco Feldenkrais trainee Boaz Lerner, whom you may remember from the previous chapter-he did origami with his feet-was living as a Hasid in the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Malachi. Through his contacts within Chabad, Lerner put forward the idea of the Feldenkrais Method . After intense consideration on the part of the Rebbe's closest confidants-Chabad was besieged with letters from healers of all stripes-the late Yochanan Rywerant, an early student and assistant of Moshe, and author of two books on the Method, was flown in to New York from Israel to work with Chabad's ailing leader. 3 When Yochanan's training commitments required him to leave New York after only ten days, a replacement was sought, someone who was both a physical therapist and a Feldenkrais practitioner. The one who got the nod was Reuven (Robbie) Ofir. An Israeli with no religious background, Robbie spent close to eighteen months working with the Rebbe, travelling daily into the heart of the Hasidic universe. He was at times assisted in this work by Feldenkrais trainer Chava Shelhav. Tradition prevented her, as a woman, from actually putting her hands on the Rebbe, and she had to "telegraph" her lessons through the rabbi's secretary! 4 The Rebbe responded well to his Feldenkrais sessions. Ofir told me, in an interview, 5 that the Rebbe "was very much attuned to the work. He responded far too fast for m y ability to keep up with him. He was way up there in the stratosphere, and he just understood." Rabbi Schneerson eventually succumbed to a complex of - 135 -

age-related disorders, in June of 1994. The story, however, does not end there, for many of his followers did not accept that he had actually died. They had come to believe-with no small encouragement from Rabbi Schneerson himself over many years-that he himself was the Messiah. In turn, this Messianic fever resulted in Chabad's becoming something of a pariah among other Hasidic groups. Moreover, the elevation of their leader to near divine status re-ignited suspicions and reactions which Hasidism had evoked among both misnagdim (religious opponents) and maskilim (rationalist reformers) some two and a half centuries before. For the student of Religious Studies, this story has a familiar ring: some believe the Messiah has come, and some do not. And some reject the whole notion of an external Messiah, in favour of changes in each individual. Although there are plenty of schisms in the Feldenkrais movement, they do not centre around Feldenkrais' divinity or lack thereof. Moshe accepted neither the authority of tradition, nor the tradition of authority. And his thoroughgoing irreverence militated against the temptations of over-inflation. The following joke was told by Ruthy Alon at a party for the completion of the third year of the San Francisco training; Moshe Feldenkrais was in attendance: One day a psychotherapist died and went to heaven, where he was received cordially at the gates, and ushered in rather more quickly than usually. "We are wondering if you could see a client immediately,"the psychotherapistwas told by the welcomingangel. Now the man was inwardly rather pleased:not only was he in heaven now, but he alreadyhad his first client. Not bad! "And who, may I ask, is this client?" said the psychotherapist. "It's God," said the angel, "He's not Himselftoday." "Andwhat seemsto be the problem?"askedthe psychotherapist. "He thinks he's Moshe Feldenkrais." Ruthy Alon reported that Feldenkrais was very pleased, and "clapped his hands on the table with unusual excitement."** Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn, the fact that the Rebbe had been doing Feldenkrais was taken as a recommendation, and the encounter between two widely divergent yet curiously related world views continued. - 136 -

* Sonu Shamdasani, in Hillman and Shamdasani, Lament of the Dead, Psychologyafterfung's Red Book. (N.Y.,Norton. 2013) 210. ** As told by Ruthy Alon at a training in Wellington, N.Z., Februar y, 2010. 1

Moshe Feldenkrais, "Mind and Body," in Systematics: The Journal of the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences, Vol. 2, No . 1, June 1964. [Excerpted on the website of the Int'! Feldenkrais Federation: http://feldenkrais-method.org/en/node/338 .] Menachem Mendel Schneerson, "Body and Soul," http:/ / www.chabad .org/

2

therebbe/ article.asp?AID=60776. 3

Yehudit Yechezkeli, "The Lubavitcher Rebbe Receives Treatment in the Feldenkrais Method," (article in the Tel Aviv Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth, April 20, 1992) . 4 Chava Shelhav , interview by the author, March, 2012. 5 Robbie Ofir, interview by the author, September, 2006.

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Chapter 18 Where Worlds Meet: The Soul and the Brain A person should consider himself as dumb, as nothing in his own eyes, and in this way his brain is renewed, both in a spiritual as well as in a physical sense, in his working life and in the health of his body, and in all that belongs to him. And, according to the character of the person, if there are a number of people dependent upon him, in the same way everyone is renewed . . . When, for example, a person falls ill, and is at a low point, nothing, this is where the remedy comes from. Because to be nothing is to be like a single dot , and from a single dot a person can do whatever he wants. 1 - Pinchas of Koretz

Thanks to his close connection to Rabbi Schneerson, Feldenkrais practitioner Robbie Ofir soon had clients from among the Rebbe's followers. Three months before the Rebbe's death, eighteen-year-old Nachum Sasonkin was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a van, along with a number of his classmates at the Chabad yeshiva. A gunman pulled up behind them and opened fire. One of the students was killed, and Sasonkin, who took a bullet in the brain, was thought to have had little chance of survival, much less of full recovery. After months and months of rehabilitative therapies, he was well enough to leave the hospital, but his movements and speech were awkward. "At that point," Sasonkin later told a reporter from the New York Times, ... the doctors told me there was nothing else that they could do to further improve my condition, but I was a young guy and I knew I couldn't live like this for the rest of my life . . . I had plans for my life ... It was clear to me I had to accomplish them. 2

Meanwhile, the word was out on the Chabad grapevine that the Rebbe had received Feldenkrais lessons, and Sasonkin gave Robbie Ofir a call. They worked together for a number of years. Today, Nachum Sasonkin's plans have born fruit: he is married, with three children, and he received his ordination as a rabbi in .2(X)4_ At the suggestionof RobbieOfir,I contacted him for an interview. - 139 -

I asked him if there was anything in his experience of Feldenkrais that resonated with his personal understanding of Hasidism. And, indeed, there was. Sasonkin referred me to Tanya. This book, you may recall, was first published in 1796 by Pinchas of Koretz's son, in Feldenkrais's birthplace of Slavuta. It is the same book of whose author, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, Moshe is reported to have said, "I like this guy, he thinks like me ." For the uninitiated, Tanya is a difficult read. The language, even in the English translation, seems to come from another era , which stands to reason , because it does . And it is difficult book to read even with a thorough background in Judaism. On the other hand, it is clear that this author, two centuries back, was very interested in the unity of the control systems of the human being, and the way the mind lives in the body. In the following passage from chapter 51, 3 the author uses as his "proof text" a well-known line from the Book of Job, which the King James Bible translates as "Yet in my flesh shall I see God ." This line is read as supporting the Kabbalistic notion that the Divine is present in creation, and not separate from it. Schneur Zalman uses the term Shechinah, which we encountered in an earlier chapter. Shechinah literally means presence . The phrase "When the Shechinah 'dwells' upon something" fascinates me. When I translate it into my own frame of reference , it seems to be saying that when one is entirely present with something, the Divine is revealed. With this reading of both Job and Tanya, the workings of God are also revealed in being present in one's body. This seems to be what is being said in the following passage. Please hang on through the difficult language; remember, these people were not journalists. This sort of language is supposed to make you work. Here are some lines from chapter 51 of Tanya, with Schneur Zalman's words in italics and contemporary Chabad commentaries in regular typeface. Note that in rabbinic writing one does not spell out a name for the Divine. In this way one acknowledges and teaches that the Divine cannot be locked into any form at all.

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Although G-d exists everywhere, His existence is concealed . But when the Shechinah "dwells" upon something, this denotes a revelation of G-dliness. However, the key to understanding the subject is to be found in the text, "And from my flesh I see G-d. 11

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The soul's principal abode (in a revealed form) and dwelling place (in an all-encompassing, non-revealed form) is in one's brain, and from the brain the soul is diffused throughout all the organs; And it is not valid to say, concerning the soul's being and essence, that it is in the brain of the head more than in the feet, since its being and essence is not subject to the concept and dimension of physical space and limitation ... Now, concerning the flow of all the 613 kinds of functional powers and vital forces which are drawn from the concealment of the soul,-concerning this flow [the Sages] have said that the principal dwelling place and abode of this flow and revelation is entirely situated in the brains of the head . From there, the brain, radiance flows to all the other organs, each of which then receives the functional power and vital force appropriate to it according to its composition and character: the power of sight is revealed in the eye, the power of hearing in the ear, and so on. But all functional powers flow from the brain ...

The specific principle to which Nachum Sasonkin wanted to draw my attention is known as ha-mo'ach shalit al ha-levliterally, "the brain rules over the heart." This may be better understood, in the words of commentator Adin Steinsaltz, as saying that the brain is the "central coordinating agency ." Steinsaltz writes, "Even the heart, which may be considered a center of life and of the blood, receives its 'instructions' from the brain. 114 Though the soul is in no way restricted to the brain, the brain is where its "instructions" are "stepped down" through its various levels to animate the body. The brain, and by extension, the intellect, includes wisdom (including intuition), understanding (including reason and discernment), and knowledge (which, as we noted earlier, is not passive, but generative). Since all of our human expressions and behaviours-emotional, verbal, and kinaestheticare mediated through the brain, it is the Hasid's job to use - 141 -

wisdom, understanding, and knowledge to refine our humanity in the service of oneness. (The acronym for these three qualities is ChaBaD.) Another famous Tzaddik, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, taught likewise, with a slightly different emphasis: In every action a man must regard his body as the Holy of Holies, a part of the supreme power on earth which is part of the manifestation of the Deity ... The brain of man is like unto the Ark and the Two Tables of the Covenant. It is the noblest part of man ... Whenever a man lifts his hands to do a deed, let him consider his hands the messengers of God.5 If you follow this reasoning, it reinforces the notion that the central organizing principle of the universe is not outside of you, but lives in you. The place where it expresses or manifests itself , represented by "Ark of the Covenant," is your nervous system, with the Biblical metaphor extending right down to the bicameral brain. When you lift your hands, your whole self manifests this principle of organization. If I understood Nachum Sasonkin correctly, it was these ideas, and, particularly, the role of the brain in movement and speech, which he recognized in his Feldenkrais lessons. Once more, we move from the abstract to the concrete. Unlike the author of Tanya, Feldenkrais would not speak of the soul, or vital force, or for that matter any other abstraction, like ki or chi, that cannot be worked with in a concrete way. He held that such terms actually confuse our learning. He did not deny the existence of more subtle realms, or that there are all sorts of wondrous things to be experienced . However, he very clearly staked out his modus operandi: to optimize learning by addressing the whole system through its most concrete manifestations. And, evidently, this was effective in the case of Rabbi Sasonkin, to the extent that he was able to make a complete recovery and accomplish his dreams. After this admittedly cursory venture into Tanya, I showed Robbie Ofir the passage I had happened upon in chapter 51, and he passed this connection onto another of his Hasidic clients, who sent the following note by return mail. (First, a brief note on "Yinglish": the Yiddish word for studying is lernen, and the word is so close to the English learn that native - 142 -

Yiddish speakers (Moshe included, see Appendix II), as well as English-speakers in the Hasidic environment, will use the word learn where the standard English term would be study.) Dear Dr. Ofir ... Missions Accomplished ... I learned chapter 51 yesterday with great pleasure applying the concepts to our work together and knowing you were also going to read the same portion. Knowing these concepts already, reminded me of my long time thought, of how brain damage is "unfair", since it compromises the Spiritual center/home-which is the essence strength to battle any illness of the body .. . I almost always feel after working with you that you have actually massaged or tweaked my brain organ. Many times while with you I find myself laughing (if not out loud, then at least to myself), not as a nervous effect, but at the Wonder of the principles applied to me by you . That laugh is my brain being touched . . . 6

There was another principle that seemed familiar to Nachum Sasonkin, as he recovered from his injuries through his Feldenkrais lessons: Do not struggle with or worry about the negative, but work with the positive. Moreover, even for a negative trait, a positive use can be found. "How did you experience this in Feldenkrais?" I asked him. He explained that if the left side, say the left hand, does not move well, then one works with the right side and improves its movement. At a certain point, the left hand notices and wants to be able to do the same. It becomes "jealous" of the other side-and this is an example of a good use of a negative trait-and this imbalance drives the left side to become better. Another Hasid who saw links to the Method in his own teachings is Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who was introduced to the Feldenkrais Method by trainer Russell Delman in the late '70s . Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi, professor emeritus at Nampa University in Boulder, was raised in the Chabad universe as a Hasid of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn . He later left Chabad and went on to become the founding father of the movement known as Jewish Renewal, which has been labelled neo-Hasidic.

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Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi was so enthused about Feldenkrais that he brought Russell Delman in to teach Awareness Through Movement in his own seminars, and, on at least one occasion, he used Feldenkrais language to explain Kabbalistic concepts. Specifically , he suggested to his students that they look at the sefirot, the ten archetypal figures in the diagram of the Kabbalistic tree, as representing functional relationships, rather than things. Then he mused: "Imagine the marriage of a Kabbalist and a Feldenkrais practitioner!" 7 On Moshe 's passing he wrote a eulogy, "In Remembrance of Moshe Feldenkrais," in the form of a traditional commentary on a verse from the Book of Samuel. In it he focuses on the advantage that David had over Goliath. Here are a couple of excerpts: And Saul clothed David in his armour. And David the King, ma y peace be upon him, could not go out against Goliath wearing Saul's armour [the story goes that he chose to fight in his shepherd's attire], for everyone has a clear and pure body around their material body of which they can make use inwardly and invisibly, so that when they later use the material body, the y will not miss the mark . . . . And therefore our teach er Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, may his memory be for a blessing, declared in his discourses that whosoever would like to learn well must prepare and organize himself through yearnings in the sense of thought and internal imagination, to meditate until he really gets the feeling of learning with pleasure. 8

1 Rabbi Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz, Midrash Pinchas ha-shalem (Ashdod : Yishlim, 2001) I:7 (D.K., trans.). 2 Yaniv Gafner, "Student Shot on Bridge in '94 is Following Faith to His Goal," New York Times, March 21, 2004 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/ full page.html ?sec=health&res=9C0 7E4DA1E31F932A15 750C0A9629C8 B63). 3 Rabbi Schneur Zalman (of Liadi), Tanya (with commentaries) (http:// www.chabad.org/library /article.asp? AID=7930). 4 Adin Steinsaltz, The Long Shorter Way: Discourse s on Chasidic Thought (Northvale : Aronson, 1988) 339. 5 Louis I. Newman, ed., The Hasidic Ant hology (New York: Schocken Books, 1963) 254-255.

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6

Dovid Kaplan , personal communication, March, 2007. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, The Ten Sefirot, (audiotapes, 1990). 8 Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, J'zechro shel Moshe Feldenkrais (manuscript, used by permission) (D.K., trans.) 7

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Chapter 19 Embracing Paradox When I did my training with Moshe in San Francisco in the mid-70s, it was clear to me that he was not teaching a method or system of techniques to be applied mechanically to a client. Instead , he was opening to us a new way of "seeing " and being so we could truly bring a different mode of consciousness to our life, our work, and the world. - Martin Weiner

If there is one phrase that sums up the troubles of our age, it is this: too much information, too little wisdom. We have the information to build nuclear weapons, and the information to build a sustainable society . But in the absence of wisdom, the shaping and organizing and mobilization of all of this information is left to a random assortment of lesser gods. Consider the life of Moshe Feldenkrais. Here is a man with vast and practical expertise : construction work, land surveying, auto-suggestion, martial arts, physics, electrical and mechanical engineering, brain science . But all this erudition does not, in itself, suggest any particular purpose that it will serve. We have the right to ask: what was it in Moshe that, since his childhood, guided his learning into a path of reconnecting people to their authenticity and enlarging their sense of possibility? It would be foolish to reduce this question to a simple answer in one dimension. But it would also be silly to ignore the most obvious possibility, namely , that Moshe's own organization was informed at a deep level by the wisdom tradition in which he was raised. Feldenkrais trainer Carl Ginsburg approaches this conclusion after studying the philosophy of Martin Buber (which Buber developed from his own study of Hasidism) , and connecting it to the way Moshe cited Pinchas of Koretz in his own teaching:

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Here is evidence that Feldenkrais came from a rich background in Hasidic lore and absorbed its teaching into his way in the world. Yet its wisdom evolved slowly in his life until its full flowering was present in the teachings he made at the end of his career. Feldenkrais ostensibly rejected the spiritual, but lived it out in his work.2 I hope the foregoing chapters have demonstrated that this tradition informs Moshe's life work in a deeper way than we have so far allowed ourselves to suspect. However it came to him, whether through family, schooling, cultural osmosis, genes, and/or some more ethereal route, this tradition allowed Moshe to place all the other elements in the "optimal circumstance to carry out their function." This piece is asking to be taken seriously and fully integrated with the rest of our understanding. And if your reading of this little book leaves you with only this one little piece, this will be enough. If we include this piece, it allows us to embrace the paradox of the Method in its fullness. Is it a science, or is it an art, or is it a path? The correct answer is: it's a herring! If we include this piece, we can emerge from the strenuous contortions required by the scientistic pose, and admit that we are involved in something more than extremely wellintegrated physiotherapy . Moshe taught a way of repairing fractured selves, through awareness in the body, and that is our work. No need to call it spiritual, no need to use words that confuse our thinking . Call it what you want; there is no higher calling than serving the birth of an unfragmented consciousness. There are amazing changes that occur when connections are made. No need to call them miracles; we see them every day.

Martin Weiner, personal communication, May, 2007. Carl Ginsburg, "Dancing Together instead of Treatment-Martin Buber and Moshe Feldenkrais" http:// www.feldenkrais-wi en.at/article.htm (Vienna: Feldenkrais ® Studiengesellschaft). 1

2

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Appendix I Storytelling as Teaching I tell stories because I believe that learning is the mo st important thing for a human being. 1 - Moshe Feldenkrais

Many people know about Hasidism only from its stories . The Hasidic story collections of Martin Buber and man y others have done more than anything else to place the wisdom of Hasidism in the eye of the general public. Among the Hasidim themselves, storytelling is the primary vehicle for passing on their tradition, and they have developed the art to a high degre e. Hasidic storytelling , like Sufi or Aboriginal storytelling, is more than entertainment . As a teaching tool it is endowed with great depth and precision , but only if we go beyond surfaces, as charming as they are. As it is with the words of the Torah, so it is with a story: there is more there than meets the ear. In this piece, we look at what makes stories the stock in trade of traditional teaching, both non-Hasidic and Hasidic. Then we will unpack a classic Hasidic story, and consider what it has to say about the roots of change. In Appendi x II, we will work with a Hasidic story told by none other than Moshe Feldenkrais. Wh y do we use stories? Why don't we go straight to the facts? And besides, how would you know which story to tell? According to a tradition older than memory itself , the best way to answer such questions is with a story , so her e are two of them : These tales feature a couple of characters who were legendary in Jewish Eastern Europe. The Gaon (sage) of Vilna (1720-1797) was a fierce opponent of Hasidism, but no one, on either side of that argument , doubted his master y of the Talmud . The Dubner Maggid (the "preacher from Dubno") (1740-1804) was a master of the art of teaching through parables. The story goes that the Gaon of Vilna brought the Dubner Maggid to live in Vilna, because he so enjo yed their conversations. One can see why. - 149 -

I. The Vilna Gaon asked the Dubner Maggid: "So tell me, what is it about your parables that is so effective?" The Dubner Maggid replied: "Let me explain it to you with a parable." Once upon a time , Truth used to wander about in the streets naked as the day he was born. And who would let him into their homes like that? People would take one look at him and run . And so it happened that one day, when poor miserable Truth was shlepping himself through the streets, he bumped right into Parable. And Parable, well he was all dressed in gorgeous, brightly coloured clothes. "Tell me, my friend," said Parable, "Why are you shlepping around looking so miserable?" "Things are not going so well, brother Parable. I am very, very old, and nobody wants to know me." "Age has nothing to do with it, my friend. I am not so young myself , and the older I get, the more people love me. So listen, I'll tell you a little secret about people. They prefer things to be fancied up and a little bit disguised . Let me lend you some of my things, and then you will see how people receive you." So Truth took this advice to heart, and put on some of Parable's fancy clothes. And since then Truth and Parable have been travelling together hand in hand, and everyone loves them. 2

II. The Vilna Gaon asked the Dubner Maggid, "Tell me, Rabbi Ya'akov, how is it that for every matter you come up with exactly the right story?" "Let me explain it to you with a parable," answered the Dubner Maggid . A rich prince of noble lineage had a son. He sent him away to a military academy to learn how to shoot. Five years he studied there, until he was winning gold medals for target shooting. And then he headed home, happy in - 150 -

the knowledge that his father would be very pleased with his progress. On the way home, he stopped in a village to rest his horse. In the barn he noticed, painted on the wall of a stall, a number of circles drawn in chalk, and in the precise centre of each circle was a bullet hole. The young prince was flabbergasted. Who could this amazing marksman be? In which academy had he studied, and what kind of medals had he won? Well, he started asking around, and eventually someone brought the marksman directly to him , a young village boy, in torn clothing and wearing no shoes. "Tell me, where did you learn to shoot like that?" asked the prince . "Well, here's what I do," said the boy. "First I shoot at the wall, just like that, and I check out where the bullet went. And then I take a little piece of chalk and draw a circle around each hole ."3 These two little gems are classic Jewish teaching stories, but they are not Hasidic stories. In a Hasidic story, it is the

listenerwho holds the chalk: Rabbi Mendel said: "I became a Hasid because in the town where I lived there was an old man who told stories about Tzaddikim. He told what he knew, and I heard what I needed ."4 Here is a typical Hasidic story, told in the words of storyteller Doug Lipman. This one looks at the roots of behaviour, and the way change may be achieved at its roots by a master of transformation. Afterwards, we will pick up the chalk. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev's grandchild married the grandchild of the famous rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi. "Now that we are related by this marriage," said Rabbi Schneur Zalman, "let us join in performing a good deed . An innocent Jew is being held by the local authorities. Let us take up a collection, to give the officials the sum they demand for his release." "Excellent idea ," said Rabbi Levi Yitzhak. "But I ask one condition. Let us accept whatever donation is offered to us, no matter how small." The two men went door to door. Two such distinguished rabbis seldom visited these - 151 -

townspeople together, so most gave generously. At last, the two rabbis came to the home of a wealthy man. He greeted them politely, then reached in his pocket, drawing out a mere half-penny. To Rabbi Schneur Zalman's horror, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak thanked the man warmly, blessed him, and turned to leave. When Rabbi Schneur Zalman had followed his companion outside , he could contain himself no longer. "Why should we accept that insultingly small amount from one who has so much!" Rabbi Levi Yitzhak said, as they walked on, "l asked you to accept whatever we were given. Please be patient." Some time later, the rich man strode up behind them. "I am sorry," he said. "Please accept more from me." He gave them a silver coin, then turned and left. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak called after him, "You are a good and generous man!" Schneur Zalman fumed at Rabbi Levi Yitzhak. "He could afford a hundred times as much! Why must we bless this stinginess?" "Please bear with me, honoured relative." They continued walking. A short while later, the rich man caught up to them again. Out of breath, he said, "Will you forgive me for how little I gave you?" He held out a sack bulging with a hundred silver coins. Rabbi Levi Yitzhak took the rich man's hand. "Yes, with all my heart," he said. The rich man gave the coins and left, obviously relieved. Now Levi Yitzhak turned to Rabbi Schneur Zalman. "May I tell you the story of that wealthy man? He has always given generously to those in need. But a week ago, a beggar approached him while he was meeting with a group of businessmen. Reluctant to interrupt the others to get his purse, the wealthy man reached into his pocket and gave the beggar the only coin he found there, a halfpenny. The beggar was furious. This rich man was famous for giving silver coins. Why had he slighted him? The beggar threw the coin at the rich man, striking him in the face. In his pain, the wealthy man vowed to stop being so generous. From now on, he would give everyone a halfpenny-no more! It is said that each step downward leads to another, - 152 -

honoured relative. He was within his rights to offer the beg-gar only what he had . But he erred when he treated others the same way. Since that day, every one who approached him has angrily refused his paltry half-penny gifts. He found himself unable to offer more. It is also said that each step upward leads to another. Once we accepted his half-penny, we loosened the stopper on his generosity. Each gift he gave made the next one possible. Now, our willingness to receive has restored him to his goodness. 115 The Feldenkrais practitioner may recognize some familiar principles packed into this story. First, current difficulties can be resolved by going back up the ladder of development to their root. Second, the teacher can use very small gestures to release or evoke larger changes. Third, close attention on the part of the teacher to his/her own organization can evoke a cascade of changes in the "client." As Levi Yitzchak demonstrates to Schneur Zalman (both were students of the BeShT's successor, Dov Ber), the teacher has to be in a particularly open and non-judgemental space to recognize small changes for what they are, and to work with them . In this story, the door of generosity is opened wide only by accepting that it is stuck closed. The same principle applies to a hip joint that will not open. This story echoes a basic truth of the martial arts, which is to work with the attack in uprooting your opponent, and not against it. As Feldenkrais student Nachum Sasonkin said in chapter 18, you don't struggle with the negative. In the following teaching, it is clear that at least one of the early Hasidic teachers noticed the connection between the play of forces on the battlefield and the spiritual struggles of an individual: Rabbi Abraham (the Angel) said: "I have learned a new form of service from the wars of Frederick, king of Prussia. It is not necessary to approach the enemy in order to attack him . In fleeing from him, it is possible to circumvent him as he advances and fall on him from the rear and force him to surrender. What is needed is not to strike straight at evil but to withdraw to the sources of divine power, and from there to circle around evil, bend it and transform it into its opposite. 116 - 153 -

1

Moshe Feldenkrais, The Elusive Obvious (Cupertino: Meta Publications, 1981) 118. 2 Israel Zevin (Tashrak), Ale mesholim fun dubner magid (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company , 1925) 25-26 (D.K., trans .) 3 Israel Zevin (Tashrak), 31-32. (D.K., trans.) 4 Martin Buber, ed., (0. Marx, trans.) Tales of the Hasidim: The Later Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1948) 270. 5 Adapted from traditional sources by Doug Lipman, storyteller, consultant, and author. See www.hasidicstories.com and storytelling newsletter at www .storydynamics .com / etips.

Martin Buber, ed . (0 . Marx, trans.), Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) 115.

6

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Appendi x II A Hasidic Story from Moshe Felden krais, with Comm entary It is a fairly safe bet that Moshe Feldenkrais was raised in an environment rich in Hasidic storytelling . One clear indication is the following tale, to ld by Moshe himself, which appears at the start of the autobiographical interview recorded in Amherst on June 14, 1981. I have transcribed it and edited it slightly for the sake of readability. My thanks to the Archives of the International Feldenkrais Federation (IFF) for the use of this item. 1 Folklorists will note that this is a classic story type, here told in the name of Moshe's ances tor. It is told of Rabbi Yona ha-tov v'ha-meytiv (the good and the beneficent) that h e wou ld sit and study by day and by night. Late one night, the shammes (beadle) noticed that the rabbi was missing. He thought maybe he had had an accident in the toilet, but he wasn't there either. He couldn't find him anywhere. After a while, the shammes noticed that the rabbi had a habit of going missing every Thursday night. Now, this was not a man who went out often, and the shammes was puzzled enough, and curious enough, to decide to spy on the rabbi. So, the following Thursday night he followed as the rabbi left his study with a pile of books, crossed the street, climbed up five flights of stairs and entered an apartment. There he picked up a crying baby, and proceeded to rock the baby until morning; then he returned to his own home. The same thing happened the following Thursday night. Finally, the shammes asked the rabbi: "What's going on with these trips across the street?" "Well," said the rabbi, "There is a widow living there who has a little baby, and she needs to earn a living. So, on Thursday night she goes out to buy a few fish at the fish market, and early Friday morning she goes from house to house selling the fish for the shabbes meal. She has no help at home, so she has no choice but to leave the baby alone . I was studying one Thursday night, and I heard the sound of a baby crying, so I went out to comfort the baby, and I do the same thing every Thursday night ." (And that, you see, is why this rabbi was known as ha-tov v'ha-meytiv-the good and the beneficent.) - 155 -

"Rabbi," says the shammes, "Is this really a job for you? Couldn't you get someone else to look after it? After all, it's not so easy for you to climb all those stairs, just to rock the baby of a woman who sells fish? Is this really something for a rabbi to do? " The rabbi answered, "You don't know the way the world works. Maybe this child could grow up to become the most learned man in Jewish history , and my only merit when I come before the Lord of the Universe will be that I rocked the greatest sage there ever was. And how do you know? It's only a baby!"

In the video, Feldenkrais pauses, looks directly at the interviewer/cameraman, and waits for the story to "land," as it were . Then, with a nod of his head, he acknowledges closure, adding: "That's the story I learned. 11

Commentary This is how Moshe chooses to begin his autobiographical interview on June 14, 1981. A typical Hasidic story contains a number of embedded teachings. If we were to unpack this one, here are some of the themes that might fall out. First, a meta-theme: Moshe talks with stories. This is, after all, the way he was taught, and the way he taught . A story is itself a map. It is what life does with facts . It conveys a set of functional relationships. To put this another way, with reference to chapter 13, a good story "places each part in the optimal circumstance to carry out its function." Moshe begins with a story, and thereby organizes his own story. What is he telling us about himself in this story, and what is he endeavouring to teach with it? At the end of the story, the rabbi tells the shammes: "You don't know the way the world works." The emphasis is on wis-dom-the how of the world. The work of Rabbi Yona, and that of Moshe Feldenkrais and his students, is about supporting the development of whole people. A person needs to be heard , to be touched , and to move in order to develop fully. Also in the story: we are responsible for our non-actions as much as for our actions. Moreover, even though the shammes thinks it would be simpler if it were not so, a true teacher is not - 156 -

separate from his people: every child deserves compassion, and every mother, regardless of status. Furthermore, a true teacher does not separate the intellect from the quality of nurturing. Whoever has seen Moshe handling a young child has seen intelligence and nurturing combined at the highest level. Death is also there. The rabbi shows his own concern with the way his life will be seen, and judged . After death, says the tradition, one's deeds are weighed and accounted for. The rabbi would like to have, on the plus side of the ledger, the spiritual merit that comes from having nurtured a sage. There is a particular poignancy here, as, whether he knew it or not, Moshe was only months away from his stroke. To whomever is listening, and will listen, with the camera rolling, Moshe is making his case.

1 Moshe Feldenkrais , autobiographical interview, unpublished video recording (Paris: International Feldenkrais Federation, 1981).

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Appendi x III Moshe's Ten Commandments The following document was left hanging on the door of Feldenkrais's studio at 49 Nachmani Street in Tel Aviv, at the time of Moshe's first trip to the U.S. to give a course . It was intended for the teachers who stayed behind to look after his classes. The Hebrew version has apparently been circulating in Israel for years; it has also been available in Europe, in Eli Wadler's German translation . Here is an English version: 1. At the first meeting with a person, don 't touch him before he has answered you concerning what is actually bothering him in this moment ,

2. before (we) know the source of his (unpleasant) sensations, and 3. what the condition of his heart is and which serious illnesses he has had . Has he ever had an operation? 4. Don't show off, just organize him . 5. Don't make conversation during the work; only respond to questions . 6. Better to do less than to do too much . 7. Don't argue, just clarify . 8. Don't answer right away, only after a while. 9. Always wind up the lesson with some sort of general organization. 10. Quiet, calm, and a practical-not personal-approach will bring you blessing, and health to those who come to see you. Be successful in your work, and thus I will be successful in mine. Moshe, the servant of God and your faithful servant. 1 15.8.71, M. Feldenkrais 1 "Faithful servant" ()DN) 1:IY) is a traditional rabbinic usage to describe Moses . (For those readers who have absolutely no education in th e Bible, Moses was the one who received the original ten commandments from on high , and brought them down the mountain to th e Hebrew trib es waiting below. Moshe is the Hebr ew form of Moses.)

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Appendi x IV A Note on the Spelling and Pronuncia tion of Hebrew and Yiddish Terms

Different authors and editors romanize Hebrew and Yiddish words in different ways. Thus, in the course of your reading, you may find a particular word spelled one way in one quotation (e.g., Hasid), and another way in another quotation (e.g., Chasid, or Chassid). Formal standards of transliteration have evolved over the years . A degree of compromise is necessary in their regard, becau se some words, like chutzpah, have entered English usage in particular guise, and changing their spelling (e.g., in proper Yiddish transliteration, khutspe) may not he lp the reader. A note on pron unciation, especially of words like chutzpah: the sound represented by "ch" or "kh" (or 11h 11 with a dot under it, where typography permits), is pronounced with the same guttural "ch" that occurs in the Scots Gaelic loch (lake), or the German Loch (hole). This guttural "ch" comes naturally to speakers of Gaelic, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and many other tongues. Anglophone and Francophone readers, however, are likely to look at chutzpah and pronounce it the way they would pronounce chestnut (Eng.) or cher (Fr.). Therefore, for the duration of this reading, I recommend that you pronounce chestnut or cher the way you would pronounce chutzpah. This will be fun for you and your friends, and will develop your chutzpah.

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Bibliography English: Aron, Milton. Ideas and Ideals of the Hassidim. Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1969. Ausubel, Nathan, ed. A Treasury of Jewish Folklore. New York: Crown, 1948. Bakan, David. Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1958. Ben-Amos, Dan and Jerome R. Mintz, trans. and eds. In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov (Shivhei ha-Besht). New York: Schocken, 1984. Beringer, Elizabeth (ed.). Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Paper os Moshe Feldenkrais. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2010. Bin Gorion, Micha Joseph, ed. (I. M. Lask, trans .). Mimekor Yisrael: Classical Jewish folktales. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Bloom, Harold. Kabbalah and Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1981. Buber, Martin, ed. (0. Marx, trans. ). Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters. New York: Schocken Books, 1947. Buber, Martin, ed. (0. Marx, trans.). Tales of the Hasidim: The Later Masters. New York: Schocken Books, 1948. Buber, Martin, ed. (0. Marx, trans. ). Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings. New York: Schocken Books, 1947. Dresner, Samuel H. The World of a Hasidic Master: Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev. New York: Shapolsky, 1986. Dresner, Samuel H. The Zaddik. Northvale: Jason Aronson, 1994. Eisenberg, Robert. Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground. New York: Harper Collins, 1995. Epel, Naomi. Writers Dreaming. New York:Carol Southern Books, 1993. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism. Princeton : Bollingen, 1972. Feldenkrais, Moshe. Body and Mature Behaviour. New York: International Universities Press, 1949. Feldenkrais, Moshe. Higher Judo: Ground Work. London: Frederick Warne and Co ., 1952. Feldenkrais, Moshe. "Mind and Body." Two lectures in Systematics: The Journal of the Institute for the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences,Vol. 2, No. 1, June 1964. Reprinted in Gerald Kogan (ed.). Your Body Works. Berkeley:Transformations, 1980.

(Excerptedon the website of the International FeldenkraisFederation: http://feldenkrais-method .org/en/node/338.) - 163 -

Feldenkrais, Moshe. Awareness through Movement. New York: Harper Collins, 1972. Feldenkrais, Moshe. The Case of Nora: Body Awareness as Healing Therapy. Berkeley: Somatic Resources, 1977. Feldenkrais, Moshe. Autobiographical Video. Paris: International Feldenkrais Federation, 1981. Feldenkrais,Moshe. The ElusiveObvious.Cupertino: Meta Publications,1981. Feldenkrais, Moshe. The Potent Self: A Guide to Spontaneity. New York: Harper Collins, 1985. Feldenkrais, Moshe. With El Teatro Campesino and Peter Brook's International Cen tre of Theatre Research, San Juan Bautista, 1973. (CD). Paris, International Feldenkrais Federation, 1994. Feldenkrais, Moshe. The Feldenkrais Method®: Awareness Through Movement® Lessons: Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais at Alexander Yanai). Paris: International Feldenkrais Federation, 1995-2004. Feldenkrais, Moshe. "Learn to Learn." http://www.feldenkraiswien.at/article -l.htm. Fishkoff, Sue. The Rebbe's Army: Inside the World of Chabad-Lubavitch. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. Gafner, Yaniv. "Student Shot on Bridge in '94 is Following Faith to His Goal." New York Times. March 21, 2004. Gilbert, Martin. Atlas of Jewish History. New York: Dorset, 1985. Gimbel, Steven. Einstein's Jewish Science:Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 2012. Ginsburg, Carl. "Dancing Together instead of Treatment-Martin Buber and Moshe Feldenkrais." http://www.feldenkrais-wien.at/ article.htm. Ginsburg, Saul Moiseyevich. (Ephraim H. Prombaum, trans.) The Drama of Slavuta. Lanham: University Press of America, 1991. Green, Arthur. A Guide to the Zahar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Halevi, Z'ev ben Shimon. Kabbalah: Tradition of Hidden Knowledge. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Circle of the Baal Shem Tov: Studies in Hasidism. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1985. (Con tains the most complete biography of Pinchas of Koretz.) Hoffman, Edward. The Way of Splendor: Jewish Mysticism and Modern Psychology. (2nd ed.). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Holtz, Barry W., ed. Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts. New York: Summit Books, 1984. - 164 -

Joly, Yvan. "Moments with Moshe," In Touch. Feldenkrais Guild ® of North America: 2nd Quarter, 2004:1-4 Kamenetz, Rodger. The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India . New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Kaplan, Rubin. My Memoirs: From Palonkeh and Baranovichi , Belarus, 1904 to 1922. http://www .jewishgen .org/yizkor/Baranovichi/baranovichi.html Langer, Jiri. Nine Gates to the Chassidic My steries. Northvale: Aronson, 1993. Matt, Daniel C. Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism. Edison : Castle Books, 1997 . Matt, Daniel C., trans . The Zahar : Pritzker Edition. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Moore, Deborah Dash, ed . East European Jews in Two Worlds: Studies from the YIVO Annual. Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 1990. Newman, Louis I., ed. and trans. The Hasidic Anthology . New York: Schocken Books, 1963. Newman, Louis I., ed . and trans . Maggidim and Hasidim: Their Wisdom. New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1962. Nigal, Gedalyah. Magic, Mysticism , and Hasidism. North vale: Aronson, 1994 . Nirenberg, David. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition . New York/ London : Norton, 2013 . Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. (L. Brown , trans.). The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Polsky, Howard W. and Yaella Womer . Everyday Miracles: The Healing Wisdom of Hasidic Stories. Northvale: Aronson , 1989. Reese, Mark. "Feldenkrais: An Illustrated Biography and Resource . Chapter One: Eastern European Roots ." (An abridgement of the first part of the first chapter.) The Feldenkrais journal , Spring , 2004. No . 17:4-15. Rosman, Moshe. Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba'al Shem Tov. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Schachter-Shalomi, Rabbi Zalman . Spiritual Intimacy: A study of Counseling in Hasidism. Northvale : Aronson, 1991. Schachter-Shalomi, Rabbi Zalman. Wrapped in a Holy Flame: Teachings and Talesof the Hasidic Masters. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,2003. Schneersohn, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak. (Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, ed.) . From Day to Day . Brooklyn : Kehot, 2005. - 165 -

Schneur Zalman, Rabbi (of Liadi). (Nissan Mindel, trans.) Tanya. Brooklyn: Kehot, 1965. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken, 1995. (First published, 1946) Shamdasani, Sonu and James Hillman, Psychology after Jung's Red Book. New York: Norton, 2013. Shatz-Uffenheimer, Rivka. "Teachings of Hasidism, Encyclopedia ]udaica, Jerusalem: Keter, 1972. (pp. 1408-1420) Steinsaltz, Adin. The Long Shorter Way: Discourses on Chasidic Thought. Northvale: Aronson, 1988. Steinsaltz, Adin. The Thirteen Petalled Rose: A Discourse on the Essence of Jewish Existence and Belief New York: Basic Books, 2006. Tuchman, Barbara. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Knopf, 1978. Wiesel, Elie. Sages and Dreamers: Portraits and Legends from the Jewish Tradition. New York: Touchstone, 1981. Wiesel, Elie. Somewhere a Master: Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends. New York: Summit Books, 1982. 11

French: Nisenbaum, Ha"im. Qu'est-ce que le hassidisme? Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997. Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. Ouvertures hassidiques. Paris: Grancher, 1990. Scholem, Gershom. Aux origines religieuses du Judalsme lalque. Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2000. Unterman, Alan. (P. Kinnet, trans.). La sagesse des mystiques juifs. Montreal: Select, 1982. Wiesel, Elie. Celebration Hassidique: Portraits et legendes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972.

German: Bloch, Chaim, ed. Chassidische Geschichten. Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1996. Eliasberg, Alexander, ed. Sagen der Chassidim, ausgewahlt van Alexander Eliasberg. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1970. Kraus, W. Moshe Feldenkrais: 1904-2004; zum 100. Geburtstag. Graz: Institut fur Bewegungsmanagement: Eigenverlag, 2004.

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Hebrew: Alperowitz, Yitzchak (ed.). Sefer Ostrog (Vohlin): matsevet zikaron lekehila kedosha . Tel Aviv. 1987. Biber, Menachem Mendel. Sefer mazkeret l'gedolei ostraha. Berditchev: Shefte!. 1907. Brooks, C. Harry. (M. Feldenkrais, trans. and commentary) Haautosugestiyah. Tel Aviv: Alef, 1977. (Originally published by Binah, Tel Aviv, 1929.) Gashuri, M. S. Ha-nigun v'ha-rikud b'hasidut. Tel Aviv: Netzach, 1955. Irgun Yotsei Baranovits b'Yisrael. Baranovichi: Sefer zikaron. Tel Aviv: Association of Former Residents of Baranovits in Israel, 1953. Ori, Azriel and Mordechai Boneh, Seier Zvhil. Tel Aviv: Ha-igud haartsi shel yots'e zvhil ve'ha-sevivah [Association of Former Residents of Zvhil and Surrounding Area], 1962. Shapiro, Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz. Midrash Pinchas ha-shalem. Ashdod: Yishlim, 2001. Shapiro , Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz. (Yechezkiel Sharga Frankel , ed.). Imre Pinchas ha-shalem . (1st ed .). B'nei Brak: Yechezkiel Sharga Frankel, 1998. Shapiro, Rabbi Pinchas of Koretz. (Elimelech Eliezer Frankel, ed.). Imre Pinchas ha-shalem. (2nd ed.). B'nei Brak: Yechezkiel Sharga Frankel, 2003. Steinman, Eliezer. Seier ber ha-hasidut. Tel Aviv: Knesset, 1950 . Steinman, Eliezer. Seier shar ha-hasidut. Tel Aviv: Neuman, 1957.

Yiddish : Dayan, Leyb. Fun khasidishn kval. Buenos Aires: Yidish, 1952, Horodetski, D. S. Der khasidism un zayne firer . Vilna: Tamar, 1937. Zevin, Israel. (Tashrak) Ale mesholim fun dubner magid. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1925.

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Typeset in ITC Ston e Serif, a calligraphi ca lly-inform ed Roman face that is a memb er o f th e Stone font family designed by Sumner Stone.

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Responsesto the 1st Editiono(MAKING CONNECTIONS: "In my eyes this is the book that Moshe would have wanted to be writtenabout him." - Ruthy A Ion am deeply moved by your book, really, as I approach the end I wish it would continue. In addition to an enjoyable writing style, I "(ind the learning about Judaism, Kabba/ah, and Hasidism wonderful ... also, the connections to Moshe's spiritual roots help me to rethink the work; what morewuld I ask for?" -RussellDelman 11 /

MOSHE-PI NCHASFELDENKRAIS , founder of the Feldenkrais®Method of somatic education , was a student of life in its depth , a fierce and gentle warrior, a teacher of uncommon brilliance . His teachings move far beyond the usual divisions of science, religion, and art, and into a realm where grace, health , and effectiveness are one. While much is known of his innovative mastery of the martial arts, his erudition in the sciences , and his interest in certain esoteric paths , Feldenkrais' own intellectual , spiritual and cultural roots have remained largely unexplored . At the same time , there are aspects of his gift that defy our understanding. In MAKING CONNE CTIONS , David Kaetz introduces friends, teachers , and students of the Feldenkrais Method ®to a vanished world . There you will find a culture of passionate inquiry, paradoxical teaching, and warm-hearted storytelling. And you will meet Feldenkrais' Hasidic ancestors, for whom he has the greatest reverence. When our understanding is grounded in an appreciation of these roots, much that has perplexed us about the man , his wisdom, and his extraordinar y adventure, emerges in a new light .

David Kaetz teaches the Feldenkrais Method® in Canada and Europe. www.davidkaetz .com

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Cover Photos.Dav id Kaetz (Bioux, France)