Herzl, Achad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Weizmann–and the roles their ideas played in developing the various tendencies in the movement for Israel’s restoration—are reasonably well known to us. Less familiar are, curiously enough, the thought and aspirations of the men who molded the ideology of those who were destined to found and rule the new state—the present Israeli labor leadership. And, indeed, it is our scant knowledge of their background that often leads us to misunderstand the intention behind this or that statement or action of the labor movement that dominates Israel’s current domestic politics, and its foreign policy. Judd L. Teller sketches here for us the men who first set forth those singular ideas that make up Labor Zionism: self-educated for the most part but keen intellectuals of a fervent idealism and an often prophetic clairvoyance.
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Whenever Prime Minister David Ben Gurion made a characteristically impulsive statement that embarrassed Israeli relations with American Zionists or non-Zionists, or drew fire from Mapam snipers in the Histadrut, Israeli Laborites used to tell you: “Berl alone could have restrained him, because not even he dared dispute Berl’s authority too often.” And Ben Gurion himself may have missed Berl’s advice as he weighed his decision to retire from the tumult of politics to the austere calm of Sdeh Boker.
From the very first, Ben Gurion made his name among Palestine’s Labor Zionists as a vigorous organizer, hard bargainer, aggressive polemicist, and resolute politician. But he had his peers in these respects. What marked him out was that he was a bit more single-minded and opinionated than the others. He was less well known abroad than some among his rivals, but he had, and still has, an uncanny instinct for grass-roots feeling at home. In the old days it wasn’t generally known that he read Greek, nor had he yet begun to challenge rabbis with quotations from the Sacred Books or hand out advice to writers and painters. At that time, between the early 1920’s and the end of the Hitler war, labor in Palestine had only one intellectual leader and spiritual counsellor, and he was Berl Katznelson.
“Berl” is remembered most fondly by veterans of the Second Aliyah, those first legendary Labor Zionists who came to Palestine from East Europe soon after the turn of the century. Among them were men like Isaac ben Zvi, now Israel’s President, Ben Gurion himself, and Berl Katznelson. They, and those led by them, brought the varied doctrines, the inexhaustible faith, the resilience, toughness, and energy that laid the foundation for Israel and her dominance by labor. Berl is remembered with awe by later generations, too. Young men and women still under thirty, kibbutzniks most of them, but some of them now civil servants, once sat at his feet and heard him discourse on “our direction.” As leaders of Histadrut’s youth movement, they shared in his long sessions of soul-searching, and took to heart his warnings against canned formulas and pat responses, and his admonitions to criticize one’s own conduct and its motives ceaselessly.
Berl Katznelson died towards the end of the recent world war. This was before the split in Mapai that produced the pro-Soviet Mapam, and before Ben Gurion had inherited Chaim Weizmann’s authority, if not status. With Ben Gurion’s rise, the world Zionist movement came for the first time under the direction of a Palestinian. Because of his new prestige, and because Berl was no longer around, the leadership of the Labor Zionist movement also fell to him. In the ten years since, Ben Gurion, testing and revising Labor Zionism’s doctrines, has discarded some and added new ones of his own. But whether he would have acquired so much authority with Berl still around is questionable; he had always been deferential towards Berl.
Berl was inviolate. “BG” and the others gave their best speeches when heckled, but Berl seldom was. He was not an orator: he was a teacher. In him moral authority was backed up by practical ability. He was co-founder of many institutions: the Agricultural Workers Federation, Histadrut itself, and several of the latter’s major projects, such as Solel Boneh, the largest of all Israel’s cooperatives; Davar, Histadrut’s daily paper; and Am Oved, its publishing house. Both paper and publishing house have declined since his death. Katznelson’s greatest single achievement, however, was to unite all Jewish Palestinian labor in the political coalition of socialist and non-socialist labor groups called Mapai. He succeeded in this because his own personal doctrines were so eclectic. He was not really an ideologue—rather the Rashi of Labor Zionism, an exegete proud to be called teacher.
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Nobody can understand Israel today without knowing what Berl and his predecessors preached. He was the last survivor of the five men whose minds furnished the brick and mortar of Israel’s labor life. Three of them were ideologues: Nachman Syrkin (1868-1924), Ber Borochov (1881-1917), and A. D. Gordon (1856-1922). Syrkin was an evolutionary socialist, Borochov a Marxist, and Gordon the anti-socialist exponent of a “mystic” religion of labor. Joseph Chaim Brenner (1871-1924), famous Hebrew novelist, contributed little to doctrine, but his personal identification with the founding fathers of Labor Zionism enhanced their prestige and sustained their morale.
Neither Syrkin nor Borochov settled in Palestine. Syrkin, although a restless student, had a formal academic training. Borochov, even more restless, never enrolled at a university, yet mastered Greek, Latin, German, French, English, Italian, Yiddish (when he was already grown up), and Sanskrit. Both were “vilde key” cast in the mold of the iluyim, those celebrated near-geniuses of the yeshivot who somehow never matured into gaonim: the ghetto’s brilliant but disheveled thinkers, erratic scholars and dilettantes of learning; of inconstant and promiscuous intellect, capable of exploring wide ranges of knowledge yet too footloose to stake a claim anywhere; blessed with an uncanny instinct for flaws in even the most perfect arguments, ingenious improvisers who sometimes, to their own surprise, created an original system in the process of dismantling someone else’s. Brenner was a madman, Gordon a saint. Both worked and died in Palestine. The novelist would bolt his door whenever seized by inspiration and run around with jacket pulled over head and face, howling like a wolf. Gordon was still a punctiliously Orthodox Jew when, at the age of forty-eight, he arrived in Palestine, where he hired himself out as a laborer and began preaching his “religion of labor.” His “sermons” were noted down and passed around from hand to hand and almost all the pioneers tried to live by his example, but it is only now that his copious written works are coming to be appreciated, and he may well go down, along with the late Chief Rabbi Kuk and Franz Rosenzweig, as one of the great Jewish moralists of our time.
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It is forgotten—Herzl, Achad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Weizmann have obscured it—that Labor Zionism was the original source of all Zionism. The latter’s real founder was Moses Hess, prophet and floundering genius, materialist and mystic, father of German syndicalism, and co-author of the first drafts of the Communist Manifesto, the man whom Karl Marx called “the red rabbi.”
In a slim volume of correspondence, Rome and Jerusalem, Hess presented an analysis of “Israel among the nations” that holds up as well as, or perhaps better than, anything similar done since. Hess warned, on the basis of his direct experience of several revolutions, that neither liberalism nor socialism would emancipate the Jew. Neither movement offered the Jew more than conditional equality, he asserted, and the condition was that he cease to be a Jew. Yet once the Jew did try to meet this condition he was rebuffed and told he was unassimilable. As evidence, Hess presented a roll call of the German socialists who also happened to be anti-Semites. Yet Hess did not lament the golah; he saw it as part of the pattern of a destiny whose fulfillment was approaching in the form of a Jewry returned to Zion and a Jerusalem Restored. He extolled the Jew’s family life as evidence of his imperishable moral nature, and saw in the synagogue a kind of state preserving the Jew for his Return to a religious and socialist Zion whose influence would radiate over the globe.
Herzl’s vision was narrower, and his analysis simpler. He belonged to the rising, ambitious Jewish middle class of the Central Europe of his day, and he had his share of its liberal attitudes. As he saw it, the Jewish problem had arisen because the Jew was denied civil liberties and socially ostracized; the solution was simple: the creation of an alternative but duplicate society. His Utopian novel, Altneuland, pictures a little Austria on the Mediterranean where the ghetto-born Jews from Grosseschiff Gasse would rise to the cultural level of those on “Das Cottage” and where those on “Das Cottage” would find their Jewishness no bar to status. The new state would, of course, improve on the Austrian model: it would be a republic, not a monarchy, and give workers a square deal.
Syrian’s dream was richer than Herzl’s, but his doctrine, though borrowed from Hess, asked for less than Hess’s did. From Fabian socialism and the earlier Utopians came his vision of the future, but his attitude towards the golah came from the extreme radical wing of Reform Judaism, and his low opinion of modern Jewry—“a people without culture or language”—from Marx.
Syrkin envisaged a socialist Jewish commonwealth with economic and domestic policies determined by a federation of producers’ cooperatives, and its people settled in villages mixing agriculture with industry. Criminals would be arraigned before doctors, not judges. The capital city would house a largely transient population of technicians, scientists, and men of general wisdom and competence; most of these would be called to the capital for special duties but would then return to the village communities which were their permanent homes.
Syrkin argued that Zionism and socialism, far from being incompatible, were actually complementary. Zionism was needed to liberate the stateless Jewish people, but the Jewish state could be created only on socialist principles. Yet if expediency invited it, or opportunism suggested it, he warned, the socialist parties of Europe would go to the point of condoning anti-Semitism. Thus far he echoed Hess, but he added something entirely his own in his first Zionist-socialist treatise, which was published in 1898, two years after Herzl’s Judenstaat and a year after the first Zionist Congress in Basel. It was this: the socialist Jewish state would be brought into being by a natural partnership between the hapless Jewish petty bourgeoisie and the Jewish proletariat; their hopelessness transcended class lines, and both desperately required a state for survival.
The synagogue, which Hess looked on as Jewry’s center of gravity in the Diaspora, was to the early Syrkin the mirror of some of the Diaspora’s less attractive features. Marx blamed the Jews for Judaism, Syrkin blamed the Diaspora for the Jews. His references to “bourse” Judaism and “practical” Judaism seem to have been lifted from Marx though it is claimed that their source is the Prophets. The impetuous Syrkin modified his views as he advanced in years. His disciples now argue that his barbs were aimed at the German Reform Judaism of his day, which represented wealth, self-righteousness, contempt for the East European Jew, and an inflexible anti-Zionism. It is curious that Syrkin himself, in the last decade of his life, extenuated Marx’s anti-Semitism on exactly the same grounds. Marx, he explained in the foreword to a Yiddish translation of Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem, generalized from what he knew of the German Jews of his day, who were possibly much as Marx said they were. But how could Syrkin, born in Russia, have had the same excuse? Moreover, he thought enough of German Reform Judaism to borrow its conception of a double tradition in Judaism: on one side, an acceptable Prophetic or universal Judaism; on the other, an objectionable Talmudic or ghetto Judaism. The new state, Syrkin preached, would adopt the former and repudiate the latter.
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B orochov was the only theoretician after Hess to conceive of Zionism as a means of interpreting and relating all Jewish history to universal history. Both Borochov and Hess held, as Herzl and Syrkin did not, that Jewish nationhood had never been interrupted, in spite of exile. They envisaged the Return, not as a deliberate solution of a pathological condition, but as historically inevitable. Because Herzl and Syrkin viewed the Jews as a nation only in the past and future—not in the present—they did not have to reject “territorialism”: thus Syrkin for a short while supported Herzl’s Uganda project. But Borochov, with his belief in the Return to Palestine as inevitable, never once wavered in that direction. This close parallel between Hess’s and Borochov’s views is all the more curious in that the former’s approach was mystical, the latter’s orthodox-Marxist. Where Hess believed that both the golah and the Return were God-ordained, Borochov affirmed them to be automatic consequences of the impersonal laws determining all human history.
Nations and movements, Borochov said, cannot force their wills on history. They are only the material of history, and whether their aspirations are realized or rejected by history depends entirely on whether or not they are in harmony with its inherent direction. He regarded Zionist socialism as “historically organic”—that is, as in perfect consonance with the historical tide. Confident like a Messiah-believing Jew in the predestined Return, the “early” Borochov held that it was futile to try to anticipate history by deliberately turning Jewish immigration toward Palestine. The time was approaching when the “natural” conditions of the golah would send them thither—and nowhere else. The golah’s “unnatural” conditions were persecution and pogroms, which could be resisted and checked. Its “natural” conditions, however, were constituted by the extrusion of Jews from their economic environment; this could not be resisted or checked. The Jews possessed no sovereign economic base, and their existence among alien peoples depended on their usefulness to the latter. They were now rapidly approaching the point of losing such usefulness everywhere and of being universally rejected. These developments could not be quarreled with, being immune to moral judgment. They were historically predetermined.
Society’s progress and the extension of political and social rights to broader and broader sections of society would not bring greater equality or security to the Jew. As larger strata of the general population were released from subjection, the Jew’s usefulness would shrink. A new “native” middle class pushes him out of his function as middleman. When, in the face of this, he turns towards proletarian occupations he discovers that the “native” proletariat is just as hostile to Jewish competition as the middle classes. From this analysis of the Jewish position in East Europe, Borochov proceeded to generalize about Jews everywhere. Warning that emigration was only a temporary solution, he predicted that as Jews poured into new countries, these would automatically reach a “saturation” point and close their gates. The Jews already settled in them would then be faced with pressure from all classes of society to extrude them.
Assimilation, Borochov explained further, was impossible. There was no reason why other peoples should want to assimilate the Jew. Assimilation was conquest. It was never initiated by the weaker party, but only by the stronger when he desired the weaker’s natural resources, access to the sea, or to his markets. The Jew possesses nothing other nations normally covet and the latter have nothing to gain by assimilating him. His hopeless economic position makes the Jew hypersensitive to the sufferings of the proletariat, and consequently class-conscious; his economic isolation, once he is being boycotted by his neighbors—Borochov cited the Pale and Poland as examples—makes him nation-conscious. The very anomaly of the Jewish condition will compel the nations to help the Jew return to Palestine—the rebuilding of which would be financed by small Jewish capitalists seeking investment opportunities denied them in the golah, which will have assimilated only really big Jewish capitalists. The Jewish proletariat would rise eventually to free Palestine from foreign controls and take full command of the government and economy of a sovereign Jewish state.
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Borochov’s faith in this as the pre-ordained plan of Zionist development caused him to be skeptical, at first, of the kibbutz effort. What for? When the time came, as determined by history, power would fall to the Jewish proletariat. The establishment of a sovereign economic base in Palestine, he predicted, would stabilize the status of the Jews everywhere in the golah, and reduce the hostility to them. In this he dissented from Herzl’s and Syrkin’s view that, the Jews in the Diaspora had no future left. Furthermore, the Jew in the golah (meaning Eastern Europe) was entitled, Borochov argued, to the full autonomy that all minorities rightfully demand, since the Jews were as much a people as any of them. His enthusiasm for Yiddish and for the folkskultur of the ordinary East European Jew was as intense as Hess’s veneration of the synagogue. Both these attitudes were entirely alien to Syrkin.
Yet Borochov’s hope for the Galut was not unqualified: all minorities would lose their will to survive once they got cultural autonomy, and disappear eventually into the majority. Galut Jewry would be no exception.
The “later” Borochov—he was only thirty-six when he died—amended and qualified the “early” one. He stopped objecting to labor’s participation in the Zionist Congresses, though these were controlled by “clerical” and “bourgeois” parties; and the “gradualist” socialism of the cooperatives no longer struck him as futile. His more orthodox followers challenged these “deviations” with quotations from his own earlier writings. After his death two different groups competed for recognition as his true doctrinal heirs—Right Poale Zion and Left Poale Zion. But Borochov’s views were hard to reduce to doctrinal unity, and the factions that fought for his mantle tended to stress one particular aspect of his thought at the expense of the others, with the result that counterfeit versions of his doctrine were circulated.
Some traces of Borochov’s ideas undoubtedly lingered on in Yevsektzia, the ruthless Yiddish-language propaganda organization of the Russian Communist party, and led to its eventual undoing. Surely the Kremlin’s thought-inspectors remembered that before 1917 Lenin had had to contend with Gentile Ukrainian socialists who called themselves “Borochovists.” In Palestine, left-Borochovists, predicting the imminent liberation of Palestine from British rule by the Red Army, founded the cell that developed into the present-day Communist party of Israel (Maki). Tired of waiting, other left-Borocho-vists departed for the USSR and there met an “automatic, historically determined fate”—to use their own jargon. Some lingered on for years in Left Poale Zion, staying out of Zionist Congresses, which they considered bourgeois, and advocating supremacy for Yiddish, or at least its equality with Hebrew. Eventually Left Poale Zion joined with Hashomer Hatzair and Mapai dissidents to form Mapam, and some tenuous threads of “early” Borochovism may run through Moshe Sneh’s dissidence, which is otherwise indistinguishable from servile Stalinism. But Mapai itself is not ready to surrender Borochov completely. Only recently Am Oved, the Histadrut publishing house, reissued his works with a highly laudatory preface by Zalman Shazar, who is a very moderate socialist and strongly inclined towards traditional Judaism.
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Although both Syrkin and Borochov . stirred the minds and shaped the spirit of the Second Aliyah, and even of some elements in the Third Aliyah, Israeli labor ideology in all its shades and factions is the essential creation of neither man, but rather the collective outcome of the experience of the early pioneers themselves. None contributed more to the interpretation of the experience than did A. D. Gordon and Joseph Chaim Brenner. Brenner’s novels held up a mirror to the Second Aliyah, and in his essays he articulated its collective thinking. His works still provide, I find, an excellent key to the understanding of aspects of Israeli behavior that might otherwise be baffling. But if Brenner painted the psychological portrait of the Second Aliyah, S. J. Agnon, in Tmol Shilshom, a novel published in the mid-1940’s, gave it the perspective of time; and veterans of that Aliyah say it is an authentic picture.
The aimless intelligentsia of the doomed shtetl, the kind of people that David Bergelson so forcefully depicted in his Yiddish novels—these made up the Second Aliyah. They were confused, tormented, at odds with their families, and full of self-pity. Uncertain of their aims, and of their relations with one another, not many knew what had really brought them to Palestine. Some had been stirred by a speech, a slogan, a hymn, or something they read. All sought escape from the narrow conformism of the shtetl and its futility. However, some of them were resolute, competent individuals who knew exactly what they were about, and it was they who made the Second Aliyah legendary.
Brenner’s novels and short stories—especially those written in the first person—present the primary traits of those who stayed on and helped build the land. Their learning was slipshod: “I read five languages and command none.” They were intolerant and sometimes insufferably arrogant: “I was stubborn and given to harsh language. . . . Brutality even then was alien to my being and could find no accommodation with the scion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, yet something brittle and acid in me compelled me to indict, arraign, and condemn everything and everybody, without quarter or mercy, and to grade all people by inscribing on their foreheads: ‘bourgeois,’ ‘blackguard,’ ‘idiot.’” It was a generation not free from vanity, given to posturing and self-righteousness. The writer-hero in one of Brenner’s novels, standing outside a theater in a gay Galician town, thinks to himself: “I look like an Essene who’s stumbled into a pagan hippodrome”—and the intent of “Essene” is flattering.
The Second Aliyah’s attitude towards Jewish tradition was ambivalent. None has given a more acid portrait of the assimilationist Russian Jewish radical than Brenner. He shows one such radical, from an Orthodox background, pretending in a reluctant discussion of Jewish holidays to be ignorant of their names, customs, and seasons, and studiedly referring to Hebrew as “that language—what do you call it? Old Yiddish? Correct?” But Brenner also lashed out at all those who talked about Jewry’s “old glory” and hoped for its restoration. “The writer who was once enamored of the West, and called upon Jews to learn from the best amongst goyim, suddenly discovers, as he gets on in years and is borne down by fatigue, that European culture is only a young and silly girl matched against our own national distinction, which should serve as the base and cornerstone (others add some trite remark about ‘the renaissance of the Orient’), etc., etc. . . .As for myself, I can testify that although I have aged, and there is gray in my hair . . . I am nowhere ready to revise my position on our so-called historic distinctiveness or to qualify my total negation of our alleged great heritage. . . .With keen and intense pleasure, I would today again erase the Atu bachartanu [“Thou hast chosen us”] legend, in all its disguises, from the prayer book of contemporary Jewry . . . scratch out and obliterate, beyond restoration, the fraudulent national verses, because there can be no salvation in meaningless national pride and pointless Jewish vanity. . . .”
Brenner reverted time and again to this theme: “I, a Zionist, can have no truck with this prattle about a renaissance, a spiritual renaissance. . . . We are not Italy. My Zionism commands: ‘The hour has struck for the most viable part of the Jewish people to terminate their life among non-Jews and their dependence upon non-Jews’. . . . The Jewish spirit? Wind and chaff. The great heritage? Sound and fury. . . . We have lived for hundreds of years among the Poles, and the scum have been spitting at us through all these centuries, yet all we did was wipe our faces and return to the foolish and useless labor of composing pilpul tomes and exegesis. Such is the nature and the substance of our spirit. It is time for an honest self-appraisal: we bear no value, we command no respect. Only when we will have learned the secret of labor and committed to memory the hymn of those settled on their own soil shall we have deserved the title Man. . . . We have sinned through not working; there is no atonement but through labor.”
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This emphasis on the soil was characteristic of that entire generation of East European Jewry. Both Zionists and anti-Zionists had a pious regard for farming as superior to all other kinds of work and, indeed, as the only authentic kind. The several ideological and philanthropic groups trying to change the occupational structure of Jewry all stressed the need for settling Jews on the soil. Those of the Second Aliyah who returned from agriculture to artisan occupations in the towns seemed haunted by guilt for having betrayed a cause or broken a vow.
This was obviously a reaction against the past. But there were many other reasons for it. From Marx to Lenin, socialist thinkers cited the absence of a Jewish peasant class as evidence that the Jews were not a nation, but a peculiar social or functional entity, and many young Jews set out to disprove this theory. The peasant had long been extolled by Slav writers as the repository of all the true virtues of his people, and notwithstanding the Slav peasant’s propensity for pogroms, the Jewish intelligentsia subscribed to this idealized image. Moreover, the long record of peasant uprisings in Russia touched responsive chords in a disfranchised Jewry.
This obsession with the soil may also have expressed unconscious resentment at the creeping industrial revolution in Eastern Europe which dislodged the Jew economically and brought him up against the new and more vicious anti-Semitism of the urban school teacher, civil servant, and Lumpen-proletariat. Given the status system of the shtetl, only the most idealistic Jew could be expected to respond to the suggestion that he surrender his hope of a professional career and become a tailor, shoemaker, or carpenter instead—which would have meant demoting himself in the eyes of his Jewish neighbors. Besides, that was no solution to the problem of winning a more dignified, independent existence for the Jew as such. Tailors, shoemakers, and carpenters were not luftmenshen, it is true, but what dignity could they hope for? Were they not dependent on the whims of customers who came from a hostile environment? Farming was different. It meant complete severance from the shtetl and its status system, and would root the Jew in soil, of which he could not, it was felt, be plundered as easily as of artisan’s tools, or shopkeeper’s merchandise. Work on the land evoked, moreover, all sorts of romantic and mystical notions. And, finally, it meant owning something, which would satisfy the shtetl Jew’s pathetic and atavistic craving for “eigene vier eilen”—one’s own four yards.
Brenner wrote: “. . . the noblest in Eretz Israel inscribed on their standard: ‘the growth in numbers of Jewish labor in Eretz Israel, and their integration with every branch of this country’s economy, is an indispensable prerequisite for the realization of Zionism.’ Sacred words, yet I would amend them by deleting the phrase: ‘an indispensable prerequisite for the realization of Zionism.’ Jewish labor—these words imply, connote, suggest, propose, and embrace everything. Jewish labor means fullest realization. If there is no Jewish worker, we must and can create him. He is an indispensable prerequisite for the existence of our people. Therein lies our salvation, otherwise Zionism does not and cannot exist.”
It was Brenner’s peculiar fate that he who extolled manual labor had no manual aptitudes himself and, though he accompanied the Second Aliyah work gangs across the land, sharing their tent-life, their illnesses and privations, he was unable to join in their actual work. To make himself useful, he gave classes in Hebrew, lectured, and presided over group discussions, serving generally as a cultural mentor. The work gangs felt reassured by Brenner’s presence in their midst, as the old Hebrews going into battle must have felt by the Ark of the Covenant or the Urim ve-Thummim.
Brenner was like the porush, or ascetic, of the shtetl. The porush would appear from nowhere to take up his station on some synagogue back bench whence he could not be dislodged until death claimed him, or he himself chose to vanish, after several years, as mysteriously as he had come. The days and nights of the porush were passed in a ritual of continual penance—sacred study, interminable fasts, and—some claimed—esoteric self-torture. Brenner had many of the same traits. He always picked out unstable chairs to sit on, explaining without self-consciousness that “I feel more comfortable this way”; he seemed also to prefer sleeping on crates and writing at a small cramped table. As with the porush, fantastic fables were current about his earlier life—the days he spent in London before coming to Palestine.
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Brenner was humble towards A. D. Gordon. Gordon was the true, the original prophet of “the religion of labor” that inspired the founders of the kvutzot. He provided the early pioneers with a personal and moral inspiration lacking in the abstract doctrines of Syrkin and Borochov. He taught Jewish men and women that they were more than mere instruments of history, and more than anonymous servants in the cause of a future Jewish commonwealth of producers’ cooperatives, that their labors were not merely a means to an end, but an end in themselves. He taught that the simple life and the humble occupation brought one into closer communion with the eternal verities and the cosmic forces. Notwithstanding his relatively advanced age and precarious constitution, Gordon himself practiced what he preached. His life invites many comparisons. There is its obvious resemblance to Thoreau’s, of whom he probably never heard. However, Gordon stressed labor, not nature, and loved the society of men. His conduct, as well as his informal discourses, reminded one of the rabbis of the early, less self-conscious days of Hasidism, before dynasties sequestered the movement. There was certainly much in him of Rebbe Levi Yitzhak Berdichever, who drew no distinctions between people and was frequently discovered in the performance of such humble and misunderstood tasks as chopping wood on Yom Kippur to heat the stove of a sick peasant woman.
Gordon was born and raised in rural Russian surroundings, where he lived without interruption up to his forty-eighth year. He received the traditional Talmudic education, but was self-taught in all else, including several languages, natural science, and philosophy. He remained a strictly Orthodox Jew even during his early years in Palestine, yet while still in Russia he became an object of suspicion to the ultra-Orthodox, especially the Hasidim, because he entertained the local intelligentsia, both Jewish and Gentile, in his home. Apparently, he never became involved with any of those socialist groupings that caught the interest of his contemporaries and their successors in Russia, or with the Hebraist movement either. His early reading in Haskalah (Enlightenment) literature, in fact, left him with a distaste for it, for he regarded Haskalah as defamatory of the Jewish character. Gordon was not obsessed with changing the Jew; he sought only to perfect him.
Gordon spent most of his life in Russia doing clerical work in villages and forests belonging to a remote relative, the one-time famous Baron Guinzburg. He seemed unable, however, to get along with the people in his own provincial white-collar class; he was fired and rehired again and again. In his forty-seventh year he went through a crisis: he was fired from his job once again, but this time he refused to plead for reinstatement, or seek a new job. He had been brooding for several years over the step he was about to take. Now there was no time to lose. He announced that he was going to Palestine. Though his wife was the only one in his family to approve his decision, he went alone to the Holy Land, and had her join him there afterwards. But he told no one of his intention to work as a laborer there.
Long-bearded, with a Russian rubashka blouse worn outside his pants, Gordon looked too old for physical work when he arrived in Palestine, and he was turned away at most of the places where he applied. Nevertheless he stayed on and lived out the remaining eighteen years of his life in Palestine, becoming one of the founders of Hapoel Hatzair, a non-socialist organization. By personal example he strove to show that labor was a religious service. At the same time he opposed the doctrines of class struggle in discourses that often sounded as though inspired by the Moral Rearmament movement. Socialism wanted to begin with society, he said, not man, and even if it were to be fully realized, “no sooner would the honeymoon be over than everything would relapse into its old state.” Man was the core of the problem, society but his reflection, its conditions but his doing: “Of course, man will eagerly embrace any doctrine that teaches that he is entitled to all, instead of responsible for all. It is easy to kindle hatred in his bowels, particularly the kind that was ostensibly extolled by the Prophets and sanctioned by Scriptures. It is a simple task to multiply misunderstandings among men. It is infinitely harder to exhume the Man in man, uncover his world and the life of his world, and unveil his being in all its depths and many directions. . . . Class-consciousness activates the herd instinct in man, diverts him from seeking his power within himself in his own work and responsibilities. . . .”
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Expecting that many moral difficulties would appear as the Labor Zionist movement grew in strength, Gordon tried to anticipate the direction, or directions, from which they would come. The demonstrative way in which his fellows of the Second Aliyah repudiated all religious tradition was to him evidence of “a lack of culture” (as he is quoted by Professor Bergman of the Hebrew University, who had many talks with him), and he felt compassion for their children who “have lost Yom Kippur.” He bitterly fought the setting up in Palestine of children’s schools based on party ideology and oriented towards class-consciousness. He warned against that “mass hypnosis” by which the partisans of the various labor groupings in Palestine seemed to be overcome, and suggested that a way be found to break the spell “without weakening the unity of public action.” He warned also against leader cults. He wrote: “The power of public hypnosis is made manifest in its capacity to suspend the judgment, stultify the abilities, and order the feelings of those under its spell. Is it sound that they who come to build this land with their labor, and revive it with their spirit, should surrender to the influence of any party or any man?” Their dignity as men, he said, makes it mandatory upon them “to balance their own accounts with life and the world.”
Nathan Rotenstreich, a perceptive Israeli essayist, has justly observed that what set Gordon apart was his vision of the Jew, not as within history, but within the cosmos. In his preface to Gordon’s works, Professor Bergman deplores the fact that no effort was made during his lifetime to determine the sources of his ideas. The two most obvious influences, Professor Bergman points out, were Tolstoy and Nietzsche. The symbolic act that marked Gordon’s break with his past, his journey to Israel, was like the great Russian’s flight to Yasnaya Polyana, Gordon, too, preached the humble life, the value of the menial occupation, and many other Tolstoyan doctrines.
To acknowledge Nietzsche as well as Tolstoy as an influence on Gordon is disconcerting, yet Gordon himself acknowledged it. Bergman argues, and Gordon’s text bears him out, that the prophet of “the religion of labor” accepted only part of Nietzsche, rejecting his ethics and his appraisal of Judaism as confused and irrelevant. Nietzsche made his real contribution by re-exploring the capacities of man, throwing new light on his dormant powers, and unveiling a “superior kind of egoism.” The “inferior” kind, according to Gordon, diminishes man, fetters him, and weighs him down with base passions. The “superior” kind of egoism enlarges him and gives him opportunities for fuller self-realization. Christianity preaches self-immolation for a cause, for faith. Judaism teaches man’s realization through a cause, through faith, through the nation. The ego realizes itself through communion with the forces outside itself, and its complete self-realization is attained when the ego loses itself in something greater. The Superman, in Gordon’s concept, is the saint—he who feels “hallowed by all the good and sublime in the world and beholden for all the unsightly and evil in the world.”
[In the second half of this article, the author will outline the thought of Bed Katz-nelson, the eclectic thinker and multi-faceted personality who, drawing together many strands, shaped, more than any other man, the pattern of the faith that animates Israel’s labor life and polity today.—Ed.]
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