A DISCIPLE OF AD GORDON
I consider myself a disciple of AD Gordon. He’s not exactly an obscure figure, but I imagine that if you didn’t grow up in a Labor Zionist youth movement, you probably don’t know who he is or why he’d be important. There’s precious little on or by him in English, so that doesn’t help. I’ve never read Hebrew well enough to read him, so my discipleship really consists of a few core lessons that remain burning within me fifty plus years after I first encountered these lessons at Habonim Camp Naaleh where I was sent because I didn’t share well and because it was cheap.
One core lesson is that our alienation exists because we Jews live in exile from our sacred soil of Israel. Thus the answer to our alienation is to return to the Promised Land and work the soil. Gordon was a co-founder of the first Kibbutz in Israel, and though he was significantly older and the leading ideologue, he worked together with his much younger comrades both in the fields and in doing construction.
I can see, in total hindsight, the three hallmarks of true purpose here. Gordon’s true purpose was to solve Jewish alienation by returning to our ancestral homeland and working the sacred land together. He embodied this belief by actually doing it, and the Kibbutz and his writing were his delivery system.
Lord knows I felt alienated as a teenager, as most of us do. But I was perhaps more alienated and more committed to not simply fold myself into what was expected of me. Even after I spent a gap year between High School and College on a kibbutz and became thoroughly disillusioned with how the vision was actually embodied, I still believed in the possibility of working land together as a path to transformation. That’s why I actually went to live on a rural hippie commune after college (where I was again disillusioned, but that’s a different story).
This belief in the possibility of transformation through working land together in community remains a core lesson for me that I learned from Gordon. How to manifest it is a different and really difficult question, and I would expand the idea of community to include the more than human beings of soil, animals, plants rocks, birds etc. I think that is tacit in AD Gordon’s thought, but not developed in what I have read.
A second core lesson I learned from Gordon is the primacy of the Jewish people. It is perhaps difficult to understand from our current vantage point, but Labor Zionism 100 years ago represented a rejection of Rabbinic Judaism. For thinkers like Gordon, they absolutely believed in the Jewish people, but thought they didn’t need, personally or communally, to follow the legal orientation of Rabbinic Judaism. They were all about, in Gordon’s term, creating a “new Jew” who did not worry about how sharp a knife was in Kosher slaughtering
A lot of Earth Based Judaism now dances with how to be consistent with the paradigm of Rabbinic Judaism. A friend of mine for instance wrote a Rabbinic response arguing that burning a sacred fire on Yom Kippur is permitted in Jewish law. There’s a dance to observe Kashrut, even as there is a push to redefine what should count as kosher meat. There’s a lot of interest in the Shekhinah, the female aspect of the divine and engagement with the complexity of asserting monotheism and wanting female Goddess energy. This dance with Rabbinic Judaism is completely understandable. If Earth Based Judaism is going to influence the existing Jewish community, working within the existing vocabularies of Jewish spirituality is where it is at.
However, I have a different vision of reclaiming the kind of spirituality and connection with the divine that characterized our ancestors before we became monotheists. I am an animist, a believer that the world around us is alive and sentient. Gordon’s view of the soil of the Holy land was my intimation of animism. For him, the soil wasn’t just something inert that was used for whatever human purpose we might imagine. It was sacred and had the ability to transform us. I still believe this about soil. And his rejection of Rabbinic Judaism (though he himself was observant) has let me feel comfortable that I am honoring my ancestors and being a good Jew, even as I am rejecting the monotheism of Rabbinic Judaism.
So I count myself a disciple of AD Gordon. It’s a bit weird to think of it that way, because Gordon was the kind of Zionist who believed that Zionism meant leaving our homes in exile and returning to our ancestral land. I’m obviously not that kind of Zionist. But what I have taken from Gordon, the emphasis on working sacred land in community as a key for transformation and the primacy of peoplehood in Judaism has absolutely shaped my life and purpose.
