Aharon David Gordon (on his 13th yahrzeit)
It is very hard, even impossible, within the frame of a newspaper article to give an assessment of the personality of the creator of the religion of labour, A. D. Gordon, in general, and of his doctrine in particular. Historical fate willed that precisely the Jewish people, which lives an abnormal life, should bring forth from itself such a personality, one who would create a new religion, a religion of labour. What was A. D. Gordon? Not a writer, not a thinker, not a party man in the conventional accepted sense of the word; something more: the creator of a new cult, a new life, a new religion for the individual, for the people, for humanity: the religion of labour. It is not new; it is perhaps the oldest of all existing and vanished religions; it was given to primeval man, but in the historical changes of generations it was forgotten, turned into idolatry; one bows to God because he gives bread, labour is not a calling but a profession, nature, the cosmos, the infinite are a matter of livelihood and profit. And man turned away from nature, from the eternal primal source of life,
turned away but not abandoned it, because man lives in its lap, breathes its air, draws from it physical and spiritual nourishment: the peasant transforms it into bread, the poet into poetry; nature itself demands its debt from sinful man. But the Jewish person is the most indebted of all; he does not demand from nature and nature does not demand from him; between them the last bond is torn, indebted not because of his own sins but because of others' sins... To buy back this torn bond is what Gordon called for: to forge a new link in the endless golden chain that is called cosmos. He demanded that the link be not counterfeit, that it be of natural gold, of the same gold standard as the whole chain; the link is called a working people. This is the basic idea that he polished, developed and deepened over the years in the small village of Degania.
There, in quiet, working Degania, at twilight, during the evening prayer of the tender golden ears of grain, in the restless murmur of the young eucalyptus forest, the ancient covenant of the Jewish people with nature, with universal humanity, with the cosmos was renewed; renewed without programmes for Jews, without legions of Jews, without declarations for Jews; renewed through the scent of Degania's fields, which in quiet hours called to creation and fertility. In this quiet spirit of the earth A. D. Gordon absorbed and created a Torah, a new teaching of life, a pure, deep, ethical, refined cult of labour, created from himself, without the help of foreign influences, without names and quotations of world luminaries. Perhaps he did not recognise them. Perhaps he did not know them; what for? A teaching of life is not made from libraries. For him there was the small library of Degania's nature; in it he found what he had sought: the eternal world spirit.
And with this world spirit he cemented the building of his life's doctrine. Being in Degania, he became acquainted with the working Yishuv and came to be regarded as the spiritual leader of working Palestine. Despite his age he showed tremendous diligence, energy and love for work, and surpassed his younger comrades: by day at the plough, by night he wrote works. A. D. Gordon gave in himself the first example of creating a culture of labour; he did not even regard himself as a writer, only as a working reader. His special approach to world problems such as matter and spirit, individual, people and humanity, nationalism and socialism, militarism and pacifism, etc., places him in the front ranks of the spiritual leaders that humanity has produced.
Moshe Friedman