Martial Judaism: A Different Kind Of Passover Preparation

In Tae Kwon Do class today, we spent about fifteen minutes learning some close quarter self-defense techniques that use your legs, and no hands. Well aimed and strategically targeted blows to the feet, legs, and knees of the opponent, and even a few techniques to use if you are on the ground and the opponent is standing. We don’t do a lot of explicit self defense training in my dojang. Mostly we concentrate on poomse (a series of choreographed punches, kicks and blocks) and World Tae Kwon Do Federation sparring. But on occasion, Master Mast teaches some digestible and straightforward techniques that almost anyone can master to give you an advantage, or an opportunity to escape if confronted with disparate force.

After class, I was talking with one of the other Jewish students in the class, and I mentioned that I really want to find an additional day each week to come at train at the dojang. My practice keeps getting better, and I feel that I would benefit greatly from another weekly session. She said that the hour she spends in Tae Kwon Do class is one of the rare moments each week when she feels truly great and free from all the stresses and demands of daily work life. I agreed and added that as a non-profit professional I am usually giving to others. But in Tae Kwon Do I feel like I am the recipient. As a rabbi and an educator, I am usually teaching, but in Tae Kwon Do I am a student. I commented how good it is for my mind to be a student and a receiver of wisdom. She added, and good for the body too.

Her comment raised for me something I have been feeling ever since I began my Tae Kwon Do practice. For all the wonder, intellectual stimulation, learning and prayer of Jewish living, there is really something missing. Our Judaism is, for the most part disembodied. We have no martial tradition that parallels the spiritual, and so much of our Jewish experiences are neck up only. Even Passover with all of its culinary symbolic gestures is mostly about what these foods make us think about. Its all pretty heady really.

More and more, I feel that Judaism sorely needs a set of physical disciplines to complete its wholistic mission. I don’t know exactly what that would look like, and we had a short conversation about how to create authentic Jewish martial practices. We remarked how any new ritual or discipline would potentially be meaningful to us as individuals, but that it would take time, perhaps even generations, for us to evaluate what stuck and what lacked that authentic “Jewishness” that would make it meaningful for us as a community and a people.

By that time, Master Mast and another student had joined the conversation, and I was saying how I wanted to teach some martial arts as part of the prayer curriculum at summer camp this coming June. And I recalled to them the passage that we read each Passover, the Torah’s account of the Israelites preparations for the exodus.

Now, anyone familiar with Passover preparations knows that among the extensive cleaning and preparing, a lot of the prep work mirrors the early Israelites' preparations before leaving Egypt more than 3000 years ago. We make horseradish (homemade is definitely best) because they brought bitter herbs with them. We eat matzah because they prepared only urgent bread as they fled Egypt. I pointed out that among the details the Torah gives for the Israelites preparations is that the they left Egypt armed (Exodus 13:18). You don’t hear this a lot. Not a lot of rabbis preach about it, and I think it makes a lot of modern Jews uncomfortable. Raised on generations of thinking of ourselves as victims and persecuted, we have embraced the victim status and even enjoy being seen as the weak but justified people. American Jews, having grown up in relative security and comfort, we emphasize the spiritual heritage of the desert – the Torah that prepared us to become a new nation and to inhabit the land of our ancestor Abraham.

But the Israelites did not only prepare for spiritual struggles. They prepared for battles of the real kind also, and left Egypt with weapons to defend themselves along the way. In a short hallway homily at the Tae Kwon Do studio, I taught a little Torah. We left Egypt, prepared to encounter God at Sinai, but we also left prepared to encounter Egypt and Amalek. My friend added that perhaps this is how we should leave our homes every day; armed with spiritual guidance to confront the temptations and failures that challenge our spirit, but also prepared with, and ready to use, our martial forces to confront the real and present dangers that threaten our body and our peace.

Master Mast nodded and said that is the Tae Kwon Do way – to be peaceful, but to be prepared. The Children of Israel left Egypt armed, ready for a fight, but not looking for a fight. Knowing how to defend yourself does not make you aggressive, and being armed, contrary to the knee jerk reaction of the TV news, does not make you want to kill someone. Being prepared gives you confidence and peace of body as you find your way through the desert and the dangerous places on your way to receive Torah and wisdom for the mind and heart.