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Aharon
David Gordon
Deganya will preserve for a long time the memory of Aharon David Gordon
(1856-1922), one of the spiritual leaders of the Zionist Labor Movement
who urged his followers to seek personal fulfillment in working the
land. Born in Russia to a well-to-do family who worked for Baron Joseph
de Guenzburg, he studies Talmud, the Bible, Hebrew grammar and general
subjects with tutors. After his wedding, he in turn begins to work for
the baron whose properties he manages for twenty-three years. Sensitive
to the living and working conditions of his workers, he willing takes
their side to defend their rights. In 1903, the baron’s properties are
sold and Gordon decides to settle in Palestine where his family will
join him five years later.
At the age of forty-eight,
he is driven by a great desire to begin working the land with his bare
hands. At first as a salaried worker in the vineyards of Petah Tikvah
and Rishon le-Zion; he then encounters the tribulations and the disappointments
of the pioneers of the second wave of immigration – the Second Aliyah:
unemployment, malaria, famine, insecurity. He wanders from one village
to another in search of employment, devoting his free time to writing
articles where he presents his ideas about Jewish destiny and the redeeming
virtues of work. He finally settles in Kibbutz Deganya where he will
remain until his death in 1922.
According to Gordon,
man maintains two types of relations with the cosmos depending on whether
he uses his intelligence to pull himself above nature in which he is
immersed in order to dominate it, or his intuition. The second mode
of knowledge is that of religion that favors life experience, preserving
the immersion of man in nature, which is experienced as divine creation,
and assuring the unity between them. Indeed, God evades all intellectual
knowledge, making Himself accessible only through the direct intuition
of His presence. In this concept of religion, work takes the place of
worship and is the primary instrument of the liberation of the individual
in the service of society.
Gordon does not
hide his reservations about Marxism, the product of intelligence and
the corollary of urban civilization, which aims only to reorganize the
world of work without taking into consideration the spiritual and religious
renaissance of the individual. He objects to its cosmopolitanism, which
advocates overstepping national particularities in favor of a homogenous
society. On his part, Gordon advocates “cosmo-nationalism”, posing the
liberation of nations as a necessary condition for the salvation of
humanity. In this perspective, the mission of Israel is to incarnate
humanity as much as possible, inscribing the national, Jewish renaissance
in the renewal of all of humanity and announcing it.
Gordon is not interested
in political acts: he does not show any enthusiasm for the Balfour Declaration,
which authorizes the creation of a national Jewish homeland in Palestine,
nor for the formation of the Work Brigades, charged with the rebuilding
of the country. He likewise disapproves of the relations that the Zionist
Labor Movement wants to cultivate with the International Communist Movement,
deeming that with complete autonomy, the Jewish workers in Palestine
must find their own path aimed at setting up a just and productive society.
The religion of
work
Gordon’s propositions, illustrated
by an exemplary life devoted to work and meditation, will for a long
time exert their influence on the Jewish community in Palestine – the
yishuv:
| The
religion of work |
For two thousand years, the Jews lived cut off from nature,
incarcerated within the walls of cities. For we have settled
down to all ways of life except for one, the life of labor –
work that is controlled by us and accomplished by us! […] a
normal people is composed of a majority of persons for whom
work is second nature. Now then, we, the others, Jews, are different;
we do not maintain any contact, positive or negative, with manual
labor to such an extent that even those who carry it out only
do so by force of necessity, permanently cherishing the hope
to free themselves from it in order to have a better life. Above
all, we are careful not to delude ourselves by attributing this
serious fault only to isolated cases for all the people are
affected. The well-known Talmudic maxim, which states that when
Israel carries out God’s will its work is carried out by others,
would be characteristic of our predispositions… It shows to
what degree this has become instinctive to us, like second nature.
[…]
Work nourishes the highest productions of our minds, the sciences
and the arts, doctrines and ideologies. What we call culture
in the limited sense of the word, the great realizations (which
readily come to mind when we speak about culture in our circles),
is but the butter extracted from culture as understood in the
largest and most general sense of the word. Now, can we produce
butter without milk; or by producing it using our neighbor’s
milk and consider it our own?
Didn’t come to Palestine
in search of what is not found elsewhere – the fresh milk of
a healthy and working-class culture? We are not here to create
an academic culture, at least not as a priority, but a living
culture in which that of the academies will be a part. And it
is from this culture that the cream of a more distinguished
culture can be drawn. We intend to develop doctrines and ideologies,
to create art and poetry, to produce a morality and a religion,
all sorts of productions that grow on the compost a full life
and in close connection to it. We must then establish healthy
inter-human relations, nourished by the vital ties between the
present and the past. What we wish to create is life – our life
- in our spirit and our fashion. Speaking more crudely, I would
say: in Palestine, we must accomplish with our own hands achievements
that the generation of life itself demands. We ourselves must
accomplish all types of work, from the easiest, the cleanest
and most sophisticated to the dirtiest and most difficult. Each
of us in his own manner should feel and think what an ordinary
worker feels and thinks – only then will we truly realize our
own culture, our own life.
Henceforth, everything
seems clear: our primary ideal should be work… It should become
the pivot of our aspirations, the foundation upon which we establish
our national structures. It is only by making work our ideal
that we can rid ourselves of the affliction that has struck
us for generations and repair the rupture that separates us
from nature. Work represents the greatest of human ideals, that
of the future, and a great ideal can reveal itself to be a healing
sun. […]
What we need are
work zealots – zealots in the finest sense of the word.
A.D.
Gordon, Writings
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