A terrorist’s attempted murder of an Israeli family recalls an old fable—and a lesson for us all:

A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road. The Chicken says, “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”.

Pig replies, “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?”.

The Chicken responds, “How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?”.

The Pig thinks for a moment and says, “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved!”

Another example: childbirth. The father was involved, but the mother is committed.

In this terrifying tale, the mother is committed, while the terrorist is merely involved:

An Israeli mother in the small agricultural community of Sde Avraham managed to fight off an armed terrorist on Monday, saving herself and her young children from murder, Maariv/nrg reports.

Yael Matzpun was sleeping in a room with her four-year-old daughter and two-year-old son when she was awoken by heavy footsteps in the hall. She knew that her husband, an IDF officer, was not due at home.

“Suddenly I saw a terrorist in a kefiyyeh [head scarf] standing opposite me,” she told Maariv. “I decided that if I didn’t fight, he would murder me and my four children, there would be a massacre like in Itamar, where the Fogels and three of their children were murdered in their home.”

The terrorist turned on the light and said something in Arabic, she recalled. He had a knife in one hand and a metal pipe in the other. Suddenly he lunged at Yael, stabbing her in the face and shoulder.

What the terrorist did not know is that Yael is an athlete trained in KRAV MAGA, Israeli military hand-to-hand combat. She used her skills to drive him back and into the bathroom, and locked him in. At the same time, she pushed her young children to safety.

Once the terrorist was locked away, she called for help. IDF forces arrived only to see the terrorist escaping through a bathroom window. They gave chase and attempted to arrest him, but were forced to open fire when he refused to drop his weapons. The terrorist was killed.

“The terrorist fell into the wrong woman’s hands, from his point of view,” Yael’s father said. “Even when she was a young girl, she would hug me like a vice… After she learned KRAV MAGA she was always able to take down thugs.”

It ended as well as could be expected—except, I suppose, for the terrorist. But even he may have preferred death to living with the shame and dishonor of having gotten his butt kicked and locked in a bathroom by an unarmed woman.

But he was only involved. With her life on the line—and those of her four babies—she was committed.

BTW, if you’re not familiar with what happened to the Fogel family, whom she mentions above, you are counseled to research with caution. Their slaughter at the hands of two teenaged murderers makes for very, very, very upsetting reading. But if not for Yael’s training—and her commitment to survival—her family’s outcome very likely would have been the Fogels’.

What can we learn from this disturbing story? A couple of things. One is that this beautiful and blessed world carries evil and ugliness within it. (In Hamas, for example, Israel has an enemy that proudly proclaims: “we love death more than you love life.” The terrorist in question here infiltrated from Hamas-controlled Gaza.) I guess we all know this duality of the world, which is why we study Krav in the first place: if we just wanted to get our heart rates up, we could skip rope.

The other thing I take away from this story is the resolve to take my training as seriously as Yael Matzpun did. Even half as seriously would probably be an upgrade. Brian, Patrick, Danelle, Julian and Matt can make the self-defense drills as stressful and realistic as they want, but if we don’t bring our own commitment to the fight for survival—if we’re not able to imagine ourselves in Yael’s position, even if only for a few seconds, and to respond with a measure of her commitment in that moment—what are we training for?

I don’t expect to be confronted by a knife-wielding terrorist in the parking lot of Whole Foods, but if I am, he can have my organic fresh-ground peanut butter. What he can’t have is my family. (I’m on the fence about Nantucket Blend whole bean coffee—it might depend on the time of day.) It’s up to me to know the difference, when to go or let go. But it’s also up to me to train to the level where I can realistically make that choice.

That’s what Yael Matzpun teaches me.

Josh

PS: One more lesson. How many times have we heard Brian say this: if you go up against a knife, you’re going to get cut. You just have to keep going. She did, and she did. And she did.