we risk bringing disaster on our own heads if we do not make proper use of our independence. And that is the real difference. That is the thing which the Jewish people has never possessed in all its wanderings, even in its most agreeable and secure interludes. And here it does possess it. We have to hold on to it carefully, lovingly, and also somewhat wisely.
(Adapted from a radio talk broadcast in 1977)
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A.D. Gordon today
Sometimes, as you wander among ‘rounded’ philosophical systems, ‘waterproof ideological constructs, novel schemes for the improvement of society and the State, you find yourself taking down a volume of Gordon from the shelf, and occasionally you discover that he can be more nourishing than even the most ‘up-to-date’ and ‘sophisticated’ thinkers. It is a good question why young people today do not find him interesting. Is it really only his style that is against him? Or is there something in my gut feeling that in a few years from now, when the wheel has come full circle, Aharon David Gordon may become a kind of trendy guide for enquiring youngsters?
Gordon distances himself with a certain irony from ‘scientific socialism’, because he fights shy of any tendency to mechanical, schematic formulation. The root of evil, he says, lies not in the structure of society but in the deformations of the individual psyche. For example, if all the trouble in the world flowed from the contrast between exploiters and exploited, it would have been resolved long ago, because the exploited would have risen up against the exploiters and put an end to all exploitation. But the enslaved do not dream in their hearts of hearts of being liberated: no, they dream of becoming exploiters and enslavers, and doing to others what was done to them.
Between us and the teaching of A.D. Gordon stands the barrier of the ‘romanticism of the hoe’, which is what is responsible for the view that the whole of his thought is passe: what is the point of hoes in an age of sophisticated computers? But we need to distinguish between what is essential in Gordon and what is merely incidental. This needs to be said particularly to veteran Gordonians who have erred in the direction of an excess of piety, and failed to distinguish between what was good in its time, and what is still valid today: they are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Gordon’s essential message is distinctly valid and relevant in today’s Israel: that old worker’s suspiciousness, his ironic reservations about the various ‘tools of sovereignty’, his wise Jewish shrug of the shoulders about all the power and might of political organisations, the machinery of power, and rulers’ schemes. Gordon treats all forms of power and of political organisation with a certain irony: ‘power’, ‘Party’, ‘movements’ etc. he regards as mere toys, as a modern form of idolatry. He abhorred all the ‘games of the nations’ in which bloodshed, slavery, oppression, and fraud reign supreme, men’s minds are corrupted, and all means are permitted for the sake of some end encapsulated in a slogan.
However unpopular it may be with us today, it should be recalled that Gordon did not believe in politics. He even refused to get excited about the Balfour Declaration, and had some reservations about the setting up of the Hebrew battalions in the First World War. (He may have been mistaken in both cases, but
I am fascinated by the spirit of his message, not the details.) What comes through these reservations (and others) is a profound distrust of the power of instruments to improve the world, and he considered as instruments all organisations, political parties, and states. He believed in the gradual improvement of human nature through a purification that must come through intimacy between individuals, through a renewal of links with the old elements: the soil, the cycle of the seasons, tilling the soil, ‘mother nature’, inner rest.
(Adapted from a radio talk broadcast in 1977)
----
----
A.D. Gordon today
Sometimes, as you wander among ‘rounded’ philosophical systems, ‘waterproof ideological constructs, novel schemes for the improvement of society and the State, you find yourself taking down a volume of Gordon from the shelf, and occasionally you discover that he can be more nourishing than even the most ‘up-to-date’ and ‘sophisticated’ thinkers. It is a good question why young people today do not find him interesting. Is it really only his style that is against him? Or is there something in my gut feeling that in a few years from now, when the wheel has come full circle, Aharon David Gordon may become a kind of trendy guide for enquiring youngsters?
Gordon distances himself with a certain irony from ‘scientific socialism’, because he fights shy of any tendency to mechanical, schematic formulation. The root of evil, he says, lies not in the structure of society but in the deformations of the individual psyche. For example, if all the trouble in the world flowed from the contrast between exploiters and exploited, it would have been resolved long ago, because the exploited would have risen up against the exploiters and put an end to all exploitation. But the enslaved do not dream in their hearts of hearts of being liberated: no, they dream of becoming exploiters and enslavers, and doing to others what was done to them.
Between us and the teaching of A.D. Gordon stands the barrier of the ‘romanticism of the hoe’, which is what is responsible for the view that the whole of his thought is passe: what is the point of hoes in an age of sophisticated computers? But we need to distinguish between what is essential in Gordon and what is merely incidental. This needs to be said particularly to veteran Gordonians who have erred in the direction of an excess of piety, and failed to distinguish between what was good in its time, and what is still valid today: they are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Gordon’s essential message is distinctly valid and relevant in today’s Israel: that old worker’s suspiciousness, his ironic reservations about the various ‘tools of sovereignty’, his wise Jewish shrug of the shoulders about all the power and might of political organisations, the machinery of power, and rulers’ schemes. Gordon treats all forms of power and of political organisation with a certain irony: ‘power’, ‘Party’, ‘movements’ etc. he regards as mere toys, as a modern form of idolatry. He abhorred all the ‘games of the nations’ in which bloodshed, slavery, oppression, and fraud reign supreme, men’s minds are corrupted, and all means are permitted for the sake of some end encapsulated in a slogan.
However unpopular it may be with us today, it should be recalled that Gordon did not believe in politics. He even refused to get excited about the Balfour Declaration, and had some reservations about the setting up of the Hebrew battalions in the First World War. (He may have been mistaken in both cases, but
I am fascinated by the spirit of his message, not the details.) What comes through these reservations (and others) is a profound distrust of the power of instruments to improve the world, and he considered as instruments all organisations, political parties, and states. He believed in the gradual improvement of human nature through a purification that must come through intimacy between individuals, through a renewal of links with the old elements: the soil, the cycle of the seasons, tilling the soil, ‘mother nature’, inner rest.
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