A Monumental Personality
(On A. D. Gordon's 15th yahrzeit, 24 Shevat 5682 – 5697.)
..."A people of brokers, merchants, small traders and speculators we must transform into a living, working and creative people. We have come to the Land of Israel to revive the people and the land, but above all the people. We build exclusively on the people. Not through outside forces and not by the grace of strangers will we be helped. The kindness of the nations is a sin. A people must not receive its revival and liberation through grace and charity. A people carries its strength within itself. We came to the Land of Israel before we received favours, years ago, when we had not yet thought or even dreamed of declarations, armed with the certainty of our own strength. Today too the main thing is our own strength, the strength of the people, the energy and devotion of the people. The Land of Israel is the land of the people, and the people must revive it and renew its right to the land through work, creation and life"...
These words, which A. D. Gordon spoke in his address at the founding conference of the world "Hitahdut" in Prague, were always for him the content and the personal task of his spiritually rich, creative life, which he began as a fifty-year-old pioneer on entirely new foundations. True, as soon as the Hibbat Zion movement arose, Gordon joined it at once, [unclear] organically and naturally bound together. Work, without which Gordon could not imagine the realisation of Zionism, was for him a necessity of life. One must not only revive the land, but also renew the people. One must not create a new exile in the Land of Israel. Only work can make us fully healthy, only it can bind us to the soil and emancipate us economically and spiritually. Only work can revive us, but not forced labour, which is a burden for us. Only the work through which a person feels [unclear] ... limited to collecting money for the Land of Israel, but he used to propagate the idea that every individual must personally bind himself to the Land of Israel — must settle there. But in order to give others a proper example, and above all to realise Zionism in his own life, he goes to the Land of Israel and becomes a worker, seeing in simple physical labour the source of renewal and wishing thereby to demonstrate the principle that the people will be renewed if every single individual renews himself.
..."The path of our revival is the path of work and creation. We strive to transform our people into a people of work and creation; in the Land of Israel we seek our natural home of creation and work. The renewal of a parasite people into a productive working people can happen only through work in all its forms, but chiefly through physical work in the lap of nature."
Jewish work, self-[unclear] ... which fuses the people, the land and the culture into one indivisible unity. And A. D. Gordon became the embodiment of Zionist realisation (hagshama); he became the knight of work, of the work that revolutionises life, that brings an upheaval in souls, that makes the individual and the community creative.
And not only an embodiment of work. Also of love: of a strong, flaming love that embraces whole worlds, of a love that is not merely a phrase obliging one to nothing, but which is life itself, active life. That was active love. A leader and a soldier. A leader who, without knowing it, instinctively, quietly and modestly, through the power of his own deeds, raised generations of Zionist realisers, builders of the working Land of Israel.
And a soldier, one of the people, who marched first in the ranks — brave and fearless on the hard, thorny path of work, on which, through the power of pioneering personal example, he swept along great masses of youth.
A. D. Gordon, the spiritual leader of the workers of the Land of Israel, was far from being a dogmatist or a sectarian. A. D. Gordon, the pioneer, fought effectively against parasitism in Jewish life — because he fought as a pioneer, because he himself was the first to throw himself onto the barricades against a degenerate life.
And A. D. Gordon taught us with his life that the great process of renewal within Jewish life needs the constructive, building work of pioneers who, by personal example, will educate the people that only pioneering can guarantee happiness to the individual and health to the community. That only the pure idealism of the worker will put an end to degeneration and parasitism, leading us to a higher communal consciousness, developing in us the feeling of socialisation and cooperation, of brotherly life together and of deep shared responsibility.
A monumental personality. A personality in which feeling and understanding were woven together into one indivisible whole, so that it is hard, very hard, to say which shone more splendidly in it: the great heart of a human being and Jew, or a mighty spirit that embraced distant horizons of thought and knowledge.
Today, fifteen years after his physical death, Gordon's figure stands before us as a living, mighty spirit, as the spirit of a moral titan, and calls us to pioneering realisation, to uncompromising fulfilment, to self-liberation, to a creative life in national and human freedom.
Y. L.