Fist of fury
By SIMONE ROSENZWEIG

    On a recent Friday morning, the basketball court in Sacher Park is overrun by a group of men in black pants, Oriental jackets, and thick cloth martial arts belts. With intense concentration, they move through a series of stances before embarking on a complicated dance of blocks, punches, and kicks. Their sensei, barking orders from the side, has tzitzit poking out from under his uniform, and all of the men wear kippot.
    Suddenly, two men in face masks and upper-body protective shields step into the middle of the ring and begin fighting - ducking, blocking, kicking, and punching. A class of elementary schoolchildren gathers to watch and cheer them on. The fight ends almost as quickly as it began. The two men take off their masks and slap one another good-naturedly on the back.
    The amiable combatants are practitioners of Ryukyu Kenpo Kobujutsu, a form of martial arts that originated on the island of Okinawa more than 2,000 years ago. The journey of Ryukyu Kenpo from Okinawa to Israel took centuries and was completed in 1987, when Sensei D'veed Natan, one of the discipline's highest ranking members, made aliya, bringing the art with him.
    Natan, a ninth-degree black-belt, is a native of Kansas City, Missouri. He began studying martial arts at the age of 11, as part of the curriculum at the American military academy he attended. When the lessons ended, Natan continued studying on his own, eventually training with masters from Korea and Japan.
    After serving for several years with the US military, Natan returned to the US, where he opened his own Dojo, a school for martial arts. It was then that he became interested in Judaism. Natan's rabbi suggested he move to Israel and Natan followed his advice. Here he established Jerusalem as a world-renowned center of Ryukyu Kenpo training, and his students have represented Israel at the annual Ryukyu Kenpo conventions held around the world.
    This past May, two of Natan's students, Tzedek Gilmore, now a Ryukyu Kenpo instructor himself, and 13-year-old Tuvie Hagler, accompanied him to Sweden for the World Martial Arts Society's annual convention, where they spent three days training with the world's top teachers, Natan among them. When convention activities coincided with Shabbat, both Natan and his students sat out.
    Most of the 30 students who train in Jerusalem are religious and many have been with Natan for years. There are students who drive from as far as Petah Tikva and Eli to attend Tuesday-night black-belt class, held at the Fanny Kaplan Community Center in the Neveh Shmuel neighborhood.
    Black-belt Boaz Steigman, who has been with Natan since 1997, now teaches Ryukyu Kenpo himself. Steigman says that when he was deciding where to attend university, one of the major factors that influenced his decision to choose a school in Jerusalem was that only here could he continue his Ryukyu Kenpo studies.
    "I started taking Karate when I was six-years-old. When I was in the army I saw an article about D'veed and came to see a group session. I started taking private classes with D'veed Natan and it was like moving from elementary school to university. Sensei Natan had a deeper understanding of the movements than my Karate teachers and he could answer all my questions. That made me stick with him," Steigman explains.
    Steigman, like most of the loyal students, is an Orthodox Jew, but he sees no contradiction between his level of observance and his participation in a martial art.
    "We don't teach violence, we teach how to avoid it," says Steigman. "In the more haredi communities there are more stigmas against martial arts than against other forms of exercise. Since martial arts come from the Orient, some people automatically connect them with avoda zara [idol worship]. Most of the time this is not the case, especially with Ryukyu Kenpo.
    "Ryukyu Kenpo comes from Okinawa, where it was taught to the warrior class. It simply taught them to fight and had nothing to do with religion, unlike martial arts from Japan and Korea, which may be more religion-based."
    Steigman goes on to explain that Sensei Natan was careful to remove anything from the training process that might be considered problematic from a Jewish perspective. For example, Natan's students do not bow to pictures, nor do they bow to their sensei, a practice common in martial arts training.
    Says Natan, "Judaism and martial arts work hand in glove. They are one and the same thing. It's one of the 70 faces of Torah. The moral principles underlying what we do are Torah principles."
    "I always enjoyed martial arts," says student Yehiel Perkal, an orange- belt who also happens to be a Bostoner Hassid and comes to practice in the black coat and hat of his sect. "I walked into a gym where Sensei Natan was teaching and saw that he knows what he's doing and knows how to teach, so I came back. The Ramban says that it is very important to take care of your health and this is taking care of it."
    The link between Ryukyu Kenpo and Judaism is one of the factors that led Ram Bavi, dorm director and head of after-school programming at the Or Etzion High School, a boarding school for religious boys near the southern development town of Kiryat Malachi, to introduce Ryukyu Kenpo there. Bavi, who studied with Natan at Jerusalem's Netiv Meir Yeshiva in the early 1990s, found that Ryukyu Kenpo "had a lot of connections to Judaism. You have the concept of repentance in Ryukyu Kenpo. Usually in self-defense classes you give your opponent no chance. In Ryukyu Kenpo you give him the opportunity to repent his actions. It's positive and educational."
    The club was such a success that Ryukyu Kenpo will be an official part of Or Etzion's curriculum next year, with classes twice a week for an hour and a half each.
    "The head of the yeshiva saw what I was teaching and liked it. He wanted it to be a part of the regular school program because of what it does for the boys," Natan explains. "I do have one of the most violent self-defense systems on the planet, but if I was just telling people to beat each other up, no one would come. I do all the things a mother wants. I teach her child to be a competent individual, to have self-confidence. I give them the ability to weather the storm without having to resort to violence."
    Although Natan is constantly stressing the benefits of Ryukyu Kenpo, he does admit that his students are self-selecting. "It hurts to do what we do," he says. "With me it's not happy-happy good times. You're going to learn self defense and it's going to be difficult, dangerous, and demanding. It takes a lot of time and effort. You have to defeat the enemy from within before you can defeat the enemy without.
    "One of the reasons people drop out of training is because the reality doesn't match the fantasy, because they think they will be Bruce Lee in five easy lessons. But Bruce Lee worked hard. If you really want something, it's worth sweating and paying the price. Good things don't come cheap."
    Natan is proud of those students who remain with him. "Ninety percent of black-belts in other systems don't know what my green-belts know," he says. "We are like the army's Sayeret Matkal [reconnaissance unit]. Everyone wants to be in it, but not everyone can. We're the elite of the elite."