Aaron David Gordon

The Russian-born Zionist Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922) was the spiritual leader of the Palestinian Jewish labor movement. He taught that work is the basis of human civilization.

Aaron Gordon was born in the village of Troyano, Podolia (region in present-day Ukraine). Because of Gordon's poor health, he was taught the traditional Jewish subjects by a private tutor. Later he studied at the towns of Golovnievsk and Obodovka, where he lived at the house of his relatives and met his cousin and future wife, Feigel Tartakov. For a year he studied in Vilna, after which he went back to his parents. Again Gordon had a private teacher for Jewish studies, but at the same time he devoted himself to the study of modern languages (Russian, German, French, and Hebrew), which gave him the equivalent of a high school education.

After Gordon was rejected because of his health by the Russian army, he married and for 23 years, almost until his emigration to Palestine, he lived in the village of Mohilna. Despite the fact that he was employed at the office of his wealthy relative Baron Ginzburg, he found it distasteful to support his family by the favors of his cousin, especially since no creative work was involved in his position.

At the age of 48, after Gordon's parents had died and his son and daughter were independent, he arrived as a pioneer to Palestine. He sought work as a laborer but the farmers would not employ him, and he refused to consider an office position which was offered to him by the Jewish national authorities. Finally he started to work in the citrus orchards at Petach Tikvah, and as a result of the poor conditions under which he lived he took sick. Friends took care of him. Because he did not like to accept favors, he repaid all expenses to his benefactors after his recovery.

At the end of 1907 Gordon's wife and daughter joined him in Palestine. His son remained in Russia, where he died during World War I. A few months after her arrival in Palestine, Gordon's wife died. Gordon did not like to attach himself permanently to one place or group. He moved from place to place and, finally, in 1912, settled as an agriculture worker in Degania, where he died 10 years later.

In his doctrine of love for, and return to, nature, Gordon was a follower of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Leo Tolstoy. But he disagreed with Tolstoy's belief that to give up the urban life was a sacrifice. Gordon considered that the Jew who left the Jewish Pale in Russia was not sacrificing anything but was taking part in building his individual freedom and that of his national community - the Jewish people.

Gordon also claimed, because of the many roads to Jewish redemption, that there was a need for an integration of ideas. As a result of this, he found a synthesis between the two major spiritual opponents of his generation, Ahad Haam's spiritual nationalism and M. Y. Berdichevsky's material individualism. The result was Gordon's doctrine of the "religion of work," which dictated the return of the Jew to nature and manual labor in order to renew his source of life. These ideas formed the basis of his Labor Zionism and became a cornerstone of the Palestinian non-Marxist labor movement.

Further Reading

A full-length study of Gordon is Herbert H. Rose, The Life and Thought of A. D. Gordon: Pioneer, Philosopher, and Prophet of Modern Israel (1964). See also Joseph Aaronovitch and Samuel Dayan, A. D. Gordon (1930).

Gordon, David (b New York, 14 July 1936). US dancer and choreographer. He began dancing with James Waring while studying art at Brooklyn College, and had further dance studies with Cunningham, Louis Horst, and Robert Dunn. He was a member of the experimental Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s and danced with Yvonne Rainier (1966-70). In 1970 he became a founding member of the influential improvisatory group Grand Union. He also collaborated with Douglas Dunn and frequently worked with his wife, the dancer Velda Setterfield. In 1971 he formed his own company, the Pick Up Performance Company. A highly analytical choreographer, he also draws frequent references from film and popular music, and incorporates speech into his productions. A list of his work includes Random Breakfast (1963), Walks and Digressions (1966), One Part of the Matter (1972), What Happened (1978), T.V. Reel (1982), Trying Times (1982), Framework (1983), and United States (1989). For American Ballet Theatre he made Field, Chair and Mountain (1985) and Murder (1986); for Dance Theatre of Harlem he made Piano Movers (1984). He has also choreographed for the Paris Opera and the White Oak Dance Project (Punch and Judy, 1992). He choreographed Philip Glass and Robert Coe's opera The Photographer (1983). He has also worked in the theatre: he wrote and directed The Mysteries and What's So Funny? (1991) and The Family Business (1994). In 1994 he directed Schlemiel the First, a klezmer musical based on stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, which was seen in Massachusetts and San Francisco. In 1995 he directed Max Frisch's The Firebugs for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He has collaborated with his son Ain several times, including 1997's Silent Movie.

1856 - 1922

Jewish pioneer in Palestine; philosopher of Labor Zionism.

A. D. Gordon was born in Tryano, Russia, and died in Palestine. He was educated in both Jewish studies and Russian secular subjects and spent his early adult life as financial manager of the Guenzburg estate. In 1904, when the estate was sold, he went to Palestine. He had been influenced by the secular Hebrew language and literary movement, particularly by the essays of Ahad Ha-Am. In Palestine he worked as a farm laborer, and then he and his family participated in a model cooperative agricultural community, Degania, forerunner of the kibbutz.

Although Gordon never affiliated with any of the political parties of Labor Zionism, he published essays that influenced their activities and ideologies. Extolling the virtues of working on the land, Gordon reflected on the distortions in Jewish society caused by the Diaspora. Jews had not simply been dispersed to many lands but had been denied the opportunities to work in all occupations, especially those that might sustain communal vitality. Gordon argued that only through the ideal of physical farm labor, cooperation, and mutual aid, in a return to the soil on their own land in their own country, would Jews individually and collectively be revitalized.

He was opposed to socialism in its Marxist form and was uninterested in politics, but he viewed humanity as part of the cosmos, with national communities forming and embodying a living cosmic relationship. He rejected urban culture as alienated from nature and from creativity. Just as the exile could be ended by bringing Jews to Palestine, so could the exile be banished from the Jewish soul through agricultural labor. The establishment of an agricultural base would provide the possibility for the creation of a just, humane Jewish society, especially with respect to the Arabs. He has said: "Their hostility is all the more reason for our humanity."

Bibliography

Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism: Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Elon, Amos. The Israelis: Founders and Sons. New York: Penguin, 1983.

Hertzberg, Arthur, ed. The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis andReader. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997.

Laqueur, Walter. A History of Zionism. New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1972.

Shimoni, Gideon. The Zionist Ideology. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995.

— DONNA ROBINSON DIVINE