Belief, True or False
By Moshe Katz, Krav Maga Instructor, Israel

December 25, 2013


One of the greatest challenges we face is the issue of reality. At first it may appear easy to distinguish between what is real and what is not real. What we see with our own eyes is real; Bugs Bunny on television is not real; simple enough.

As time goes on we realize that the matter is not quite so simple. Some people accept what they see on the news as real, as truth. Some people accept anything in print as true. Some people accept "common wisdom" as truth; some people accept the beliefs of others as truth.

And some people accept nothing.

There was a time when it was accepted that black men could not play baseball with white men; Jackie Robinson came along and changed all that. Buddy Holly was the first white musician to play at the all black Apollo Theater in Harlem, NY.

We tend to look at other people's narrow views and accept what can and cannot be done; we accept their limits. And yet some bold thinkers dare not to be limited by other people's narrow vision. These are the people that create changes.

Where one man sees a dead end another man envisions a great empire; where one man sees a problem another man sees opportunity and potential. One man "dreams the impossible dream", while another accepts a nightmare as his sealed fate.

In the Woody Allen film "Midnight in Paris" the message I felt was that we should not be limited even by our own sense of reality. The lead character, Gil, only finds his personal freedom when he is willing to entertain the idea that he actually transcended time and traveled to another era. This expansion of thought leads him to take practical steps to pursue what he really wants out of life; a different career and a different life partner. He discovers that his current life situation, as good as it looked, was really preventing him from becoming who he was yearning to be.

The expansion of his sense of reality created possibilities that had not been there earlier. He went from limited choices to limitless possibilities. The message of the film is that we all can do this; change your sense of reality and you are no longer limited by "reality".

In the film Dali and his friends hear Gils' story of time travel and his conflict between two women living in two different periods. Gil assumes Dali and his friends will think he is strange and find his story unbelievable. But to them this is not seen as strange at all! the story sounds totally reasonable. As avant garde artists they had freed themselves from conventional thought.

Many people do not believe they can ever truly take charge of their lives. Many people believe that it is impossible for them to be able to defend themselves. With Krav Maga our goal is to reprogram a person to believe; to believe in their potential during this lifetime, to believe they can defend themselves, to believe they can take charge of every aspect of their lives.

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