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Enter the Tragedy
BY MOSHE KATZ
CEO
ISRAELI KRAV INTERNATIONAL
October 16, 2026, Israel
Brothers.
You grow up together, you live together for the formative years of your life, and then everyone goes their own separate ways. Some brothers remain close, others drift apart. I am fortunate to be very close to my brothers despite great geographic distances.
And yet, sometimes we do not realize how our early years impacted us. Each has different memories of the same events, each was impacted differently. Some brothers have such completely different world outlooks that they cannot have a civil discussion. Again, I am fortunate that my brothers and I are all on the same page.
The other day my brother sent me an early manuscript of a book he is working on. I have only read the beginning, but I am already highly impressed, and more than that I am amazed by the similarities in our approachs. We work in entirely different fields, with different target audiences and yet our world view, our Weltanschauung, our conceptual and philosophical world view, as expressed by Immanuel Kant, is so similar.
There is a line that I want to quote verbatim and apply to our approach to Krav Maga self-defense at IKI, as it expresses it better than I have ever been able to express it.
My brother works with communities that have suffered physical disasters such as tornado's, hurricanes and so forth. He brings teams of Jewish high school kids, and they work to fix the damage, both physical and emotional. It might be a low-income neighborhood in Louisiana, and suddenly a throng of Jewish kids from New Jersey and New York, led by Orthodox rabbis, come to drain their flooded basements, build drywall, and do all the dirty work, for free!
This is the art of giving without expecting a reward. But as my brother stresses in his book, the group must come prepared for they have no prior knowledge of this type of work, they must be trained by experts in the field of construction. However, the physical work is not sufficient, they must not only have the physical tools, they must also possess a deep understanding of the people they are working with.
"We wanted participants to understand that they were not entering a project. They were entering someone else's tragedy. We prepared them to meet people before we prepared them to use tools."
Let us be honest, most of these Jews have never left their own communities, we generally travel from one Jewish community in America to another, and these local residents for the most part have never encountered a Jew, let alone an Orthodox rabbi, and often they pre-possess negative stereotypes as perpetuated by the media. And yet here are Jews ready to get down and dirty to help strangers, for free.
Now the students must be prepared to understand whom they are dealing with, people of a very different culture, people who have just suffered a terrible tragedy; the loss of their home, their fortress, and all their precious personal possessions. Before they begin to do the physical work, and use their tools, they must enter the hearts and minds of the people they are working with. We are not robotic workers.
And yet this idea, robotic workers, is precisely how most martial arts, or so called "self-defense" is taught, and I speak with half a century of experience. The instructor does not care who you are, you must line up, fit in, and follow orders. What you suffered through, what brought you to this class, is usually of very little interest. In all my years of training, in many different schools and styles, I do not recall once being interviewed. When someone joins IKI online the first e mail I send is, tell me a little about yourself, your goals, your interests, your anxieties, what brought you to here.
Enter the Tragedy - Enter the Dragon
When we approach self-defense, we need to enter the tragedy of the other person. I recall when my home was broken into by Arabs, ransacked and robbed, including many precious personal possessions such as my grandfather's gold watch handed down for three generations, my first thought was, now I can better understand the pain of victims. Now I can better understand the feeling of personal violation, of being "raped", in more ways than one. We as instructors must Enter the Tragedy, Enter the Pain, of the victim, of the student, and then we can train them to Enter the Dragon, to be that unstoppable force that will never be a quiet helpless victim again.
We need to learn how to listen to our students, to feel and identify with their pain and trauma, and we need to feel a responsibility towards mankind. We were placed on this earth to SERVE. As my brother writes, "By the time they (the students, volunteers) arrived, they understood that they were representatives of the Jewish people. They knew how to speak with a homeowner, how to listen, how to respect local leaders, and why the work was rooted in Torah and Jewish responsibility."
IKI Krav Maga is rooted in faith and values, in the belief that each and every one of us matter. As Tevye the Milkman says, "Each one of us knows who we are, and what God expects of us."
What do you want to get out of life?
Join us today, see below for training options. We came to this world to make a difference.
Moshe Katz, 8th dan Black Belt, Israeli Krav Maga. Certified by Wingate Institute. Member Black Belt Hall of fame, USA and Europe. International speaker on self-defense and security, Krav Maga seminar presenter, over 1,000 international seminars over the past 20 years.
Understand the Israeli Fighting Mentality - Israel a Nation of Warriors by Moshe Katz
What is the cultural background of Krav Maga? What makes it unique? What makes the Israeli military so effective? Why are Israeli security systems used all over the world?
What are the Biblical origins of Krav Maga and who was the first Krav Maga instructor?
What weapons and military strategies did our Biblical ancestors use?
How has Krav Maga developed in Israel and what are its goals?
All that and more in this unique book.
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