Season 2: Episode 24 -The Religion of Labor

Generated automatically from the audio and lightly corrected. It may contain errors; the recording is the authority.

It is only through labor and painful effort, said Teddy Roosevelt, by grim energy and resolute courage that we move on to better things. Well, I'm telling you I'm ready to move on, and I'm confident that better things lie ahead, because I'm Rav Mike Feuer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 24, The Religion of Labor Okay, it's time to talk about time. And if you've been listening to the Jewish story for even a little while, then you've heard me describe what we're doing as telling a story of the past to build a present identity that's motivated to build the future of which we dream. And I know it sounds good. I'm into it, really. But the question is, and this may have occurred to you, what level of agency does the storyteller have?

What exactly am I doing as I tell you this story of the past? Am I just repeating what once happened? and if that's the case, do I have any real impact on present identity and the future that we're headed for? Or maybe the flip side is true. I'm completely unrestrained by the past. Maybe I'm just telling you what I think and therefore I'm able to speak a future into being without any concern for the reality of the past. Or perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between. So since the destruction of the Second Temple, religious juries' frame for linking past, present, and future has been defined by this phrase we've said again and again, mipnei chata'enu galina me'artzenu, because of our sins, we were exiled from our land.

The idea is that we have to do God's will in the present, thereby atoning for the failures of the past, and then, God willing, merit the future redemption. And I've characterized this a number of times as a means of maintaining agency in history. In some degree, it is. I mean, it's astounding that lacking the classic structures of land, politics, and military that throughout time have actually allowed societies to shape their destiny, the degree to which the Jewish people has maintained its agency. At this point in our story, Am Yisrael has been holding fast to that notion that our deeds in the present are about repairing the past in order to get to the future for almost 1,800 years. But the link between past, present, and future has been seen as increasingly miraculous messianic rather than as a source of political action.

What I like to call the whiz-bang view of Messiah, that the temple will drop from the sky and therefore I don't have to actually do anything to bring it about. Just think about the last major messianic wave we saw, that rise of Shabbatite's fee back in the late 17th century. You can go back to episode 9 for the full story. But for now, just recall the upwelling of prophecy, the strange behavior and downright madness that accompanied his appearance. That wasn't a political movement. It didn't have any strategic aims or tactical methods. It was an upwelling of unrestrained messianic hope. And when the magical personality at its head turned out to be false, it collapsed into a smoking crater. a crater which left behind it many fragments.

That which contributed to the rise of the secular culture within Am Yisrael, and even to Zionism itself, as we've mentioned a few times. And the last person we saw in our story, who attempted to seize the reins of history in the true political sense, was Bar Kokhba, that revolt that he led back in the 2nd century. And I hope you recall where that got him. Not only was his rebellion crushed, but he was enshrined in the rabbinic collective memory as the archetype of the sinner who attempts to force the end through the strength of his own hand. And since that last gasp of political effort to change the future, the weight of our story's relationship between past, present, and future has been messianic.

Meaning that to some degree, the Jews have become enamored of the notion that there's an unbridgeable gap between the present and the future, or at least a discontinuity. but modernity revolutionized the way in which all Europeans began to think about time, Jews included I want to think with you a little bit about how that changed the Messianic notion and how it really in many ways paved the way for the feasibility of Zionism because part of the question that we have to have in the back of our minds as we go forward in this story is how on earth this small group of people albeit intelligent, albeit extremely creative But how do they manage to awaken an entire nation? Like I said, modernity revolutionized the ways in which Europeans thought about time.

First of all, the Enlightenment birthed the notion of progress, of an inevitable advance toward the highest good, as Kant called it. Really what they did was they took Christianity's notion of redemption, which of course Christianity had taken from the Jews, and they stripped it of its religiosity. And since the Enlightenment philosophers were also enamored of universal conceptions, their vision of the highest good toward which humanity was moving was a single cosmopolitan human society. It was a society they imagined of universal political freedom, universal moral rectitude, free from irrational tribal prejudice, and particularist religion. And of course, as we know, because we've spoken about it, Judaism was seen as the most tribal and particular game in town.

Though in our heyday the enlightened philosophers recognized that we had brought to light the critical notions of one God and abstract divinity, at this point we're viewed as an anachronism. We're the appendix of humanity. We're clinging to archaic laws that enshrine prejudice and rejection of other and are actually, in the minds of many, impeding the progress toward this universal cosmopolitan highest good. The Jews are stuck in the past. And that's why so many of the Enlightenment philosophers, if you recall Voltaire, chief amongst them, see us as the refusers of the new religion of reason, and therefore unfit to join in this universal, enlightened future. In his ideal for a universal history, Kant envisioned spiritual homogeneity as humanity's future.

He says differences in religion, an odd expression, just as if one spoke of different moralities. Well, here in the postmodern era, that phrase different moralities ought to strike a chord, but for Kant, it was inconceivable. And it's not hard to see how a good part of the Jewish people are actually still holding by this vision of redemption. They jumped on the bandwagon in the Enlightenment, and they never got off. After all, Abraham Geiger, founder of the Reform Movement, as we know, did away with the traditional messianic concept and replaced it with a Kantian age of global harmony. Quote, I believe that Judaism is above any national body, since its mission is to unite and affirm all peoples and all languages.

Therefore, says Geiger, it is the primary obligation of all believers of Israel to free Judaism from any national boundaries which do not belong to its essence and only restrict its development. Instead, he says, Judaism should be transformed from a religion of one nation into a religion of the world. In short, Geiger believed that history had finally caught up with the Jews and the Enlightenment. Now, there's another important stream of the inevitable. Karl Marx, father of, not just communism, but more importantly for our discussion, dialectic materialism, he built on this teleology, the idea that history is inevitably moving toward a higher end. And he built on its elements of inevitability and its expanding cosmopolitanism, that everyone is being brought into one unit.

But in Marx's eyes, Enlightenment philosophers just didn't go far enough, because he felt that professions of equality, of citizenship, and a unity of faith, as long as capitalist society was the context, these things became lies, because the economic system against which he struggled reduced men to a means to the ends of others. To Marx, the political sphere might be characterized by ideals and universalism, but the economic sphere was still the realm of ego and exploitation. And, of course, I'm sure you'll recall from a previous episode that Marx had no love lost for his former people, son of an apostate that he was. His theory of dialectic materialism, that again thought an inevitable progression from feudalism to capitalism to the communist utopia, envisioned Judaism disappearing like an insipid haze in the vital air of society.

Oh, how happy, as we'll see later in this episode. Marx's secular messianic vision attracted many, many Jews. in particular, the hope that the inevitability which dialectic materialism asserted about the relationship between past, present, and future drew many Jews who had lost faith in the traditional redemptive model. And as we'll see, not only did the Jewish religion have no place in Marx's vision, it's going to take quite a bit of work and a very special personality to reconcile Marx's universalism with Jewish national aspirations. So, aside from the cosmopolitan universalist, the 19th century also produced a more particular strain of perspective on the progress of history. When the romantic currents in European culture began to finally overtake the forces of pure reason, Johann Gottlieb Herder introduced a new view of time and humanity into European thought.

because the herd of the nation is the true unit of measure for human society and therefore the measure of time because he understood the nation to be an organic unit as such the relationship between past, present and future in history is clear and unavoidable you're born, you live, you die now that may happen at different paces for different peoples but it is unavoidable each nation has its pace of progress but the past leads inevitably to present and future and one end awaits us all. Now, the Jews were a bit of a sticking point for Herder. We're basically a fossil with no future. There is no resurrection in his scheme of organic nationalism because history is inevitable, continuous, and one way.

You can't go back. Now, Herder wasn't alone in this worldview. And the next major step came actually from Hegel. Hegel was the one who strung together all these elements of national history into world history. And for Hegel, world history was a dialectic progression between an idea, its opposite, their union and destruction when they meet, and the emergence of a higher ideal. It's a progression of the unfolding of the absolute spirit, which for Hegel, I hope you remember what we've spoken about, is really embodied by human advance toward rational knowledge and freedom. Each nation comes into the world to embody a distinct idea which contributes to this process, and once it does that, it passes from the stage of history.

Therefore, the Jews, having long ago contributed the idea of monotheism to the advance of the world spirit, are done. There's no place for national revival here. The past has the present firmly in its grip, and therefore the future is inevitable. So you see, it's strange. We've got two strains of thought, well really three. There's the Messianic, which for the Jews does open up the possibility of real change in the future, but it really holds no agency. Religious Messianism has become the whiz-bang theory. It's almost magical. As long as we, in the present, stay focused on the past, God will take care of the future. And then you have the cosmopolitan brands of historical inevitability, which see Judaism as a particular throwback that's going to have to just disappear into this universalist utopia, which is inevitably dawning.

And then there are the more particularist, nationalist advocates of teleology in history, that history is also unavoidably headed to a purpose. and they said that the time of the Jews had passed long ago and if we're still sticking around, we're just a fossil. So what's a Zionist to do? How did the leadership of the emerging movement think that they could free themselves in the present in order to create a new future which wasn't inevitably dictated by the past? Well, fortunately, the cultural and philosophical breakdown that was associated with the turn of the 20th century, some of which we touched in in the last episode, cast out on a lot of things, and in particular on the notion that history is an inevitable progression in which humanity's task was simply to get on board.

And perhaps there was no single personality who did more damage to conventional 19th century notions in general, and certainly of time and human agency, than Friedrich Nietzsche. Now, I know he's got a complex name in Jewish thought, and now is not the time to discuss Nietzsche in his own right, or even try to unravel his relationship to the Jews. What matters to the end of this introduction is that the commonly held notions of an inevitable progress of history, whether they were universalist or particulist, had begun to fall apart at the end of the 19th century. And they were under deep attack, in particular, by Nietzsche. Just listen to this. Overproud European of the 19th century, you are raving.

Your knowledge of history does not perfect nature. It only destroys your own nature. Compare the heights of your capacity for knowledge with the depths of your incapacity for action Because Nietzsche saw clearly the paralyzing effect of a teleological view of history I mean if the world is progressing inevitably toward its destination, why do anything? And in asserting that history was in fact meaningless, a formless void in which the truly valuable individuals would be the ones who give themselves laws and create themselves their future? Nietzsche was instrumental in providing the Zionist thinkers with the notion of time, which would allow for national rebirth through human agency. Now remember, the question that we're dealing with is what's the relationship between past, present, and future?

And classical Jewish religious thought, as I said, had a backward-looking posture. The present was a quest to embody the dictates that we've received from the past, and in turn, to keep our eyes on the past, we have to keep our back on the future, which is fine because when the present adheres to the past then God will send us the future, the Mashiach will come. There's no call to turn around in the present and face the future in traditional Judaism. And the secularization of Jewish culture and modernity fell prey to that teleology of history. Either we're moving inevitably to the dissolution of the Jewish people, and we see a huge element of that in the way in which the Jews met in modernity, stepping right into cosmopolitan universalism or just a national fossil already been thrown in the dustbin of history whether we like it or not.

It will be the Zionists who reject the notion that the present is bound by the past. And they're the ones who tap into that incredible energy which is available when you feel free to reimagine the future. They sensed a rupture in time. History itself was broken. whether it was an absolute break or simply an opportune moment that might disappear at any time. And it was their urgency to exploit that break in time that gave so much power to their actions and which led Micha Yosef Berechevsky, one of the great founders of modern Hebrew literature who we're not going to get to but you should know had a tremendous impact on Zionist thought. It led him to say this, This hour we are facing is not like yesterday, not like what came before.

all the grounds and conditions at home and outside we've lived have collapsed those long nights have ended and instead new days and conditions have emerged and the fear in our hearts is not for nothing since we're no longer standing on the main road we've arrived at a point where two worlds collide to be or to vanish to be the last Jews or the first Hebrews Okay, now we've got to talk about the system, and in particular the capitalist system. Because since 1830, revolution has been roiling Europe and passing like waves through society. We met the Jewish roots of socialism and communism in the personalities of Moshe Hess and Karl Marx. You can go back to episode 18 to check out their story. But here, at this point of our story, at the end of the 19th century, we've achieved perfect storm conditions.

Urbanization is uprooting masses of people from the countryside and sending them to the cities, where they lead a rootless existence. They've left their tradition behind. They've left the social fabric that they know. The Industrial Revolution has created the factory method. It has become a widespread means of production, and all it lacks is the labor that these rootless people can provide. And finally, the race of European nations to industrialize, colonize, militarize, is empowering the capitalist system to treat this proletariat, this urban poor, without much more consideration than they're going to give to the other raw materials along the assembly line. Marx had seen it all coming. Aside from his historical worldview, the dialectic materialist view of how capitalism would eventually destroy itself, he mapped out a process of alienation, which is worth contemplating in this context.

Here's how it goes. Capitalism, founded on the private ownership of the means of production, divides society into two classes. You have the property owners and the workers. and paralleling the process of production says Marx is a progressive alienation of the worker first from the products of their own labor the worker doesn't own them all he owns is his labor next from the process of labor itself which is forced and not a creative act the worker is a tool in someone else's hands the next break is with their own human identity because for humanity life is work and done well, work gives a sense of purpose and meaning and identity. But in the modern system of private ownership of production and the division of labor, work is nothing more than a means to the ends of survival and that robs the worker of an essential identity.

You're just trying to work to live, sound familiar? And finally comes the estrangement of man to man, as Marx calls it. The worker begins to see first the capitalist as alien and hostile to them and then eventually the other workers as a threat to their own survival. This is bad news. And socialism is going to graft itself onto the roots of Zionist thought. And I think it's the experience of alienation, frankly, that allows this strange hybrid not only to live, but to thrive, because the Jews, of course, are feeling increasingly alienated within European society. Now, we've spoken, even in the introduction, over and over again, about the historical frame of because of our sins, we were exiled from our land.

But you know, we haven't yet touched the second half of that phrase. Those of you who are familiar with the traditional liturgy know that the continuation is we've been distanced from our ground. Because exile is far more than a physical distance from the land. It's not just a scattering amongst the nations. and therefore healing 2,000 years of homeliness is going to take a lot more than a physical ingathering to a geographic location. There's an alienation from the land, an estrangement from the embodied life lived in the land which can really only be engaged after we've come home. Only once the Jews are gathered back into our land can we begin to contemplate what it means to be estranged from our grounding.

But for now, at first glance, socialist Zionism seems to be a contradiction in terms. I mean, socialism and Marxism are avowedly internationalist, cosmopolitan movements. After all, Marx declares in the Communist Manifesto, the workers have no country. And Zionism, of course, is an avowedly national movement. Now it's true, if you know a little bit about Marxist history, that Marx and Engels occasionally supported national liberation movements, but they did so only insofar as these movements furthered the spread of the capitalist system and thereby hastened its downfall. Overall, by most people, nationalism and socialism were seen as intrinsically oppositional. And this indeed was the view of the largest Jewish socialist party of the 20th century, the General Jewish Labor Federation, also known as Lebund, which is Federation in Yiddish.

Early capitalism was not kind to any worker in Eastern Europe. But on top of the class divisions that we just described that affected every laborer, Jewish workers faced in particular widespread anti-Semitism as well, and that often kept them completely out of the more advanced industries. So you had a situation in which Jews began to fill the sweatshops which thrived on intense manual labor, provided poor working conditions, and of course, minimal wages. Hunger, poverty, disease began to be the lot of a growing Jewish proletariat. They sat at the lowest rungs of Jewish society, and that meant of European life in general. And in the 1880s, a small group of young Jewish intelligentsia began to build bridges across this class divide.

They themselves were mostly from the middle class, and they were the products of the emancipated education that we spoke of in previous episodes, which meant that they were immersed in Russian or Polish culture, and at this point, that they were imbibing in their universities the revolutionary ferment. The first step that they took was to organize discussion circles. Their goal was to politicize the workers, and therefore they selected the prime candidates from amongst these circles to pursue a course in Russian literacy, natural sciences, and ultimately the crown jewel of socialist and Marxist thought, political economy. Like I said, the goal was to politicize the workers, which meant to detach them from Jewish culture and to integrate them into the general revolutionary movements.

As Yuli Martov, the early leader of the movement, said in 1895, the aim of the Jewish social democrats, who are active amongst the Jewish workers, is to build a special Jewish workers organization that will educate the Jewish proletariat and lead it in the struggle for economic, civil, and political rights. Now, you might wonder why an internationalist cosmopolitan movement would have a specifically Jewish branch. Well, and part of it was simply organic. I mean, Jewish revolutionaries knew how to speak to Jewish workers. Yiddish was way more than just a language to these Bundists. It was the national culture. But another part was anti-Semitism. The relationship between the Bund and the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, which was the umbrella group for all the revolutionary parties of Russia at the time, was complicated by the deep-seated nature of the Russian distaste for the Jews.

So the work of politicizing the Jewish worker came to fruition with the founding, as I said, of the General Jewish Labor Federation in 1897. Ooh, that's an interesting year. That's right, the Bund came to be in the same year as the first Zionist congress in Basel, organized by Theodor Herzl. And as one old Bundist noticed in a recent interview I read, the Zionists held their first congress in a casito in Basel. The Bundists, on the other hand, had their first meeting in the attic of a farm near Vilnius a month before. The Zionists were bourgeois from the start, he said. It's great, by the way, if you want the link, I'll send you the article. So, despite the technical and cultural factors that focused the Bund's activity on the Jews, its founders did not, initially at least, view the organization as specifically Jewish, and certainly not as a nationalist one.

Their ultimate aim was to integrate the Jewish worker into the general Russian proletariat. And because of that, the Bund strongly opposed Zionism, almost from the outset. In their eyes, the idea of immigration to Palestine as a solution to the Jewish problem was just an escapist fantasy. And not only that, because they were looking to the workers of the world to unite, they saw Zionism as a reactionary and chauvinist movement interested only in the betterment of a particular people rather than the liberation of the whole world. Now eventually you must know that the Bund came to accept their nature as a specifically Jewish group of socialists. But they remained opposed to Jewish nationalism actually to this very day.

The Bund is still around. Their vision was one of cultural nationalism, as they call it. Yiddish culture in particular. Not a state or place is the glue of Jewish national life. Vladimir Medim was a Russian Jew who became one of the Bund's most important theorists, and he gave form to their vision of national autonomy, which wasn't territorially defined, but in his mind, would exist within the ideal socialist state of the future as a culture of the Jews. And as I said, the Bund's relationship with the Russian revolutionaries was less than happy. But that changed with the revolution of 1905. Now, this revolution is a story unto itself, and like so many things that pop up in the Jewish story, we can't tell it all.

I mean, you should know, by the way, that the infamous anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that we mentioned as having showed up in 1903, really got its heyday of publication in 1905. And, you know, they're accusing the Jews of the attempt to take over the world with all the liberal democratic values that, well, many Jews are espousing today. But anyway, 1905 was a key year. The revolution essentially was a massive wave of political and social unrest that rocked large parts of the Russian Empire. Now, it didn't go too far because in the end the military remained loyal to the Tsar. It didn't become that true revolution that came in 1917. 1917, sorry. But the government did grant a constitution and allow for the formation of a parliament.

But as you know, if you know Russian history, constitutional monarchy had a short life in Russia. In 1905, aside from the revolution, there's a date that we're going to return to in the coming episode, when we discuss the critical Second Aliyah, that wave of ideological immigrants who went up to the land of Israel with visions of building a new society. Many of them were set into motion by the failure of 1905 within Russia. But for now, tens of thousands of Jewish workers and students responded to the Bund's call to take to the streets, and that forced the Russian workers' parties to accept the Bund as a legitimate partner. For now, they could be Jews as well as revolutionaries. For now. It critical to know that at the beginning of the 20th century the Bund was by far the largest and best organized Jewish organization in Eastern Europe They claimed 34 members in 274 branches And at least in Russia, there was a glorious superior head for the Bundus, who played an active role in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

But that, unfortunately, wasn't a story that ended well. The Bund was absorbed into the Soviets and then into the Communist Party. and many of its surviving members ended up imprisoned or executed in the Stalinist purges that followed. In Poland, the Polish Bund continued to thrive until the Nazi invasion of 1939 where they played a critical role in the struggle against the final solution a story to which we will return. And of course, if you know anything about American culture the Bund had a tremendous influence on the development of the Jewish labor movement and liberal Yiddish culture on the other side of the Atlantic over in the United States. I mean, really down to this day, it's not exaggeration to say that Bernie Sanders is a product of the Bund, in a manner of speaking.

But for our story, it's the tension between socialism and Zionism that we need to explore. Because not every young Jewish socialist in Eastern Europe wanted to have to choose between their national identity and the dream of building a worker's paradise on Earth. When the Bund officially rejected Zionism in 1901 and chose the international socialist vision over the particularist Jewish one, a split amongst Eastern European Jews appeared imminent. Though, in all fairness, to call it a split is a bit of an exaggeration, as the number of active socialists and their sympathizers far, far outweighed the number of Zionists amongst Jews in 1901. But, you know, at this point in history, in the 21st century, it's a truism that Jews are overrepresented in any movement which aims to better the world.

And this was certainly true of socialism at the beginning of the 20th century, which should come as no surprise, because for more than a thousand years, the Jews of Europe had been raised on a belief in messianic redemption, on the irrational hope that no matter how bad things look, Yeshua Geharif Ein, redemption can come in an instant. never underestimate the power of hope, by the way. It's a basic need, as fundamental as food, air, and water, and oftentimes people are willing to go without those in order to maintain hope. So when the religious underpinnings of this hope were undermined by the forces of modernity, at least for large parts of European Jewry, the need for it didn't go away. And lo and behold, Marxist dialectic materialism, the idea of an inevitable progression toward a secular redemption, in which history replaces God and economics take the place of Torah fit perfectly into that void.

And it's so Jewish. Not just the idea of redemption, or its inevitability, but even what the worker's paradise looks like. Now, I'm sure we've discussed before that there's a fundamental split in the mind of our sages about the relationship between our world and the messianic era. Not just the split, it's actually kind of a polar opposition. On one side, we have Rav Chir Ba'Aba, who says in the name of Rabbi Yochanan that all the words of the prophets lying down with the lamb, children playing in the viper's pit, all that is speaking about the messianic era, which will be a time of miraculous transformation. That there's a discontinuity between our world and the messianic era. Let it be soon. Let it be now.

On the other side we have Shmuel who says Ein ben olam hazeh limot ha-mashiach Ela shibud malchuyot bilvad. That there is no difference between our world and the time of the Messiah other than our subjugation to the nations. In other words, in Shmuel's eyes, the Messianic era is a time of socio-political transformation. And in the introduction, I emphasize that since Bar Kokhba's failed attempt to re-establish Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, the weight of rabbinic thought, of religious thought in general, has been heavily tilted toward this whiz-bang Messiah, toward the idea that there's a discontinuity continuity between our world and that blessed time, one which only God can cross. And we noted how this posture of messianic expectation, this sort of backward-looking stance as we move forward in time, saps the motivation of the Jewish people from any practical mood toward redemption, or even just toward repatriation.

But, there's one notable exception in the rabbinic pantheon. That's the Rambam of Moshe ben Maimon. And if you haven't, go back to the first season of the Jewish story, to episode 21, to get his story. Because when you look at the last two chapters of the Rambam's great legal work, the Mishneh Torah, you'll see that they're informally known as Hilchot Mashiach, the laws of the Messiah. And there, the Rambam poskens like Shmuel. He actually says that the law follows Shmuel's vision. not only does the Rambam see the Messianic era as defined by Israel returning to political and spiritual independence in their land his proof is from Bar Kochba's failed revolt proof he says can be brought from the fact that Rabbi Akiva one of the greater sages of the Mishnahh was one of the supporters of King Bar Kochba and would describe him as the Messianic king he and all the sages of his generation considered him to be the Messianic king until he was killed because of his sins.

Once he was killed, says the Rambam, they realized he was not Mashiach. Okay. This pragmatic attitude, that anyone who tries to push the redemptive process forward has the presumption of being the Messiah until they either prove it through success or disprove it through failure, has profound implications for the way we relate to the Messianic elements in Zionism. But we'll get to more of that later. For now, where I started is I'm fascinated by the fact that the workers' paradise in the mind of Marx and the Rambam's vision of Messiah are strikingly similar. Because as the Rambam says at the very end of these laws of Messiah, the very end of the Mishneh Torah as a whole, in that era there will be neither famine nor war, envy or competition, for good will flow in abundance and all the delights will be freely available as dust.

Well, so far, Marx is a Rambamist. No competition. Ha ha, take that, Adam Smith. But of course, the Rambam adds one more critical line to the description. And the occupation of the entire world will be solely to know God. Physical redemption must have a purpose. Only a world in which everyone is taken care of, or a world of abundance and peace, as he calls it, is a fit vessel for the fullness of divine relationship. And eventually we're going to have to discuss the challenge, which faces both socialist and political Zionism. What happens when you succeed? What happens when you envision redemption in purely sociopolitical terms, and then you actually get your state? Don't forget, the human being is a meaning-seeking creature.

Hope is more important than food, air, and water, and meaning trumps hope, or perhaps is its source. But for now, we can understand just a bit why the Jews of the 19th century were swept up so easily into the dream of a worker's paradise, which history would inevitably provide. But the one sticking point was that they were Jewish workers, even in Russia, certainly in Poland. And as such, they had a tribal association which had to be either abandoned or integrated into this historical process. The Lubun tried to sail on the cosmopolitan ship, though even they were still members of the tribe and ended up with the notion of cultural autonomy as a compromise between the particular and the universal. But the nationalists within the Bund wanted more.

And in 1901, with the rejection of Zionism, a group of Marxist workers centered in Russia and Poland broke away to form the Poelezion, the Workers of Zion. And the Poelezion will play a foundational role in shaping Jewish society in the land of Israel in the pre-state era and informing the political parties that led it for almost 30 years once the state was born. And we'll talk more, particularly next episode, I think, about their practical accomplishments. But just so you appreciate it, the importance of this split in Jewish socialism for the Jewish story, Poli Tzion will found the Hashomer Guard Organization, first effort at Jewish self-defense in Israel. They will begin to build the Kibbutzim, the collective settlements, which were far more successful in settling the land than the colonial farm model of the first wave of immigration.

They set up the employment offices, health services that evolved into the institutions of labor Zionism in the modern state. They founded youth movements that are still around today. Hashomer Hatzair, Habonim Djor. It's incredible what was done. And as we'll discuss a bit at the end of the episode, they were the ones who took up the ideology of the conquest of labor, Kibush HaAvodah. And of course, this was back when Avodah Yivrit, the idea of using Jewish labor, was a left-wing issue. But before we can talk about the achievements of socialist Zionism on the ground, we have to understand how such a strange hybrid came to be. And in order to do that, we have to meet Ber Borkov. So Ber Borkov was born in 1881 in the Pale of Settlement, which is now central Ukraine.

and he grew up in a home shaped by his father Zionism and his mother's dedication to education. As he ventured out into political work, Borkov came under the influence of Nachman Sirkin, who himself had been one of the leaders of the Socialist Zionist faction at the first Zionist Congress. Sirkin actually played a critical role. He's got his own story that you can pursue on your own. But for now, just know that he was essential in the development of Socialist Zionism. He was in fact the first person to suggest that the immigrants to the land of Israel should form collective agricultural settlements. But he was no Marxist, nor really a lover of political theory in general. It was Borokov, however, who was.

He was both. He was the one whose reconciliation of Marxist theory and Zionist dreams allowed so many Eastern European Jews to feel that they didn't have to choose between their national aspirations and the dream of a worker's paradise. In essence, Borokov shared the fundamental Marxist notions about the importance of the working classes and their ultimate role in secular redemption and the progress from capitalism to socialism. He also agreed with the Marxist critique, by the way, of the economic niches that Jews had traditionally filled in European society being way out of balance. But Borokov believed in the importance of national existence. He saw political independence as a precondition for the victory of socialism within any social group, since, like Moshe Hess before him, if you recall, Borokov saw national and ethnic divisions as overshadowing class conflicts in history.

We must understand, he says, that class consciousness cannot develop normally unless the national problem, in whatever form it may exist, has been solved. And in characterizing the upside-down nature of Jewish economic life in Europe, Borokov described what he called an inverted pyramid, in which the agricultural and industrial activities, which should be the broad base of a society, were actually the needle-thin tip, because the Jews, of course, had been excluded from agricultural work for quite some time, and because of certain skill sets, had pushed their ways into the traditional capitalist industries. In Borokov's vision, a normal productive life was the necessary precursor to socialist evolution.

And furthermore, he believed that the struggle over the means of production, which was the heart and soul of Marxist revolutionary vision, could only take place within a well-defined social unit, meaning somewhere with a defined territory, a distinct language, and self-governing bodies. They're all defined by Borkov as the conditions of production. That means that the Jews have to have a land. as he taught, our ultimate aim is socialism. Our immediate need is Zionism. The class struggle is the means to achieve both. Now, Borkov, interestingly, also broke from Orthodox Marxist thinking in their belief that the inevitable dialectic progress of humanity would bring the workers' paradise. He felt that maybe other nations could be deceived by such naive optimism, but the Jews were wise enough to see progress for what it really was.

We do not rely on progress, he says. We know that its over-pious proponents inflate its achievements out of all proportion. It's too soon to speak about the moral progress of nations, of the termination of that destructive national egoism. Progress is the double-edged sword. If the good angel within man advances, the Satan within him advances too. And it's astounding to me how postmodern that thought is. Right up until the bomb went off over Hiroshima, or people saw what had actually gone on behind the gates of Auschwitz, most people believed that progress was intrinsically good. Now, later in his life, Borokov did come around to believe in what he called a stychic process, a spontaneous evolution from the present into the future with no need for humor intervention.

But it was not that later Borokov that influenced Zionism. In fact, this notion was rejected by many of his followers, the future founding father and prime minister of David Ben-Gurion among them. When he introduced this new notion in a 1917 speech, chaos erupted amongst his followers. We do not accept the new Borokov, they shouted. We believe in the theory of the old one. Well what was the theory of the old Borokov which held so much appeal It was the assertion that pathological situations can develop within society Situations which lack any potential to be corrected from within It's not going to happen on its own, taught Borokov. He said that such a situation requires social therapy. And that therapy is not about fixing what is.

It's a radical act that destroys what is and replaces it with something that has never been. and that requires the intervention by an elite. People who themselves are able to bring to life new forces that had never before existed and would not have appeared on their own. These people accept that today is a poor indicator of tomorrow and they're willing to risk total destruction of themselves and everything they know in order to give birth to a future unconstrained by the past. And it was the emphasis that Borokov's early thought placed on a pioneering elite, which have fired the imagination of so many of his followers. As he says in his essay, on the question of Zion and territory, the individual element plays a huge role.

For us, it's not the quantity of members that it's important. Rather, we desire that they should possess a high quality of consciousness and devotion. They will be the pioneering foundation of the movement. And indeed, as we'll see in the next episode, that ideal of the pioneer is what drove the foundation of the modern state. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, Borkov was in the United States, but he rushed back to Eastern Europe to read a paper in Kiev on Russia as a commonwealth of nations. During the speaking tour that followed, he contracted pneumonia and died within a month at the tender age of 36. But Baird Borkov left behind a critical legacy. He built a bridge between cosmopolitan socialism and parochial nationalism, which swelled the ranks of Zionism from the left.

And he taught his followers that the Zionist dream would succeed when they accepted the power which lies in the hands of a conscious elite, a group of people who see that history is broken and are willing to step into the breach. And once the workers of Zion knew this, they just needed to get to work in the land. and when they arrived, low and hold, there was a prophet there waiting to lead them. Aaron David Gordon, A.D. Gordon, was born in Pedalia in western Ukraine in 1856. His is a familiar story. He was brought up within an Orthodox household, only child, and the first phase of life was devoted to managing a large estate on behalf of wealthy relatives. Gordon was an early member of Chibatsion, that lovers of Zionist movement, which placed its emphasis on practical settlement in the land.

And as someone whose only fanaticism was his intense insistence that his deeds conform to his beliefs, he immigrated to the land in 1904. Now, this is when his story becomes exceptional. Try to picture it. He arrived at the port of Jaffa at the tender age of 48, having spent his entire working life behind a desk, and actually being notably weak and bird-chested. It would have been easy and reasonable for him to seek out similar employment in his new home. But Gordon's thoughts changed upon his arrival. As he wrote in a later essay, In my dream I come to the land, and it's barren and desolate and given over to strangers. And the land of my forefathers is distant and foreign to me, and I too am distant and foreign to it.

and the only link that ties my soul to her the only reminder that I am her son and she is my mother is that my soul is as desolate as hers so I shake myself and with all my strength I throw the old life off and I start everything from the beginning and the first thing that opens up my heart to a life I have not known before is labor not labor to make a living not work as a deed of charity but work for life itself it is one of the limbs of life one of its deepest roots, and I work. And work he did. Gordon sought out the simple life of an agricultural laborer from the moment he set foot in the land of Israel. Now, the pioneer lifestyle of hard manual labor was fast becoming the ideal of the second aliyah.

But unlike the other young pioneers, Gordon was middle-aged, weak, and a complete stranger to physical labor. Nevertheless, he began to work in the orchards of Petach Tigva, and he ultimately found his home, physical and spiritual, in one of the first communal settlements known as Degania, a story that we'll tell next episode. Life there was so hard that his wife, who joined him after a year, soon died from malaria. Now, Gordon had begun his life as a religious Jew, and according to many accounts, he maintained a significant attachment to the commandments, even once he arrived in the land. But when he got there, a great spiritual ideal began to move him, and his writings and personal practice were devoted to articulating this ideal.

In a sense, Gordon was one of the three most original thinkers of his era who struggled to understand the relationship between the rise of a secular nationalism, of Zionism, and Judaism. Back in episode 22, we spoke about Ahad Ha'am, and he saw Zionism as a natural evolution of Jewish tradition which was going to shed its religious nature in modern age Judaism 3.0 as it were and in a later episode we'll speak about Avraham Yithchak HaKohan Cook who saw secular nationalism as a critical but temporary phase in the redemptive process but Gordon saw the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel not as an evolution away from religion or as a stopgap measure on the path to redemption but as a potential bridge to a whole new form of religiosity.

And the thoughts which emerged from his encounter with the reality of the land were a mix of his traditional origins the Tolstoyan naturalism he had imbibed in Ukraine and a healthy dose of nationalism. First off, in his eyes, the primary problem faced by humanity was our estrangement from nature And therefore, the Jews as a people and humanity as a species must return. As he says, And when, O man, you will return to nature, on that day your eyes will open, you will gaze straight into the eyes of nature, and in its mirror you will see your own image. You will know that you have returned to yourself. But Gordon wasn't just a Tolstoyan naturalist. He didn't want to simply go backwards to nature. Nor did he see that gradual evolutionary process ahead like a ha-da-am.

The redemption which Gordon sent available in our return was revolutionary. On that day, he continues, you will know that your former life did not befit you, that you must renew all things, your food and your drink, your dress and your home, your manner of work and your mode of study, everything, says Gordon. He's not interested in change or repair. He wants everything to be new. And this is, of course, what he did. Cast off a way of life he'd lived for almost 50 years and embrace hard labor. Gordon's thought was transformed by the land. And in particular, we find within his thought a harmonization of the nationalist and universalist elements, which I think is only possible through a grounded engagement and labor in the soil of his ancestral home.

On one hand, Gordon was beyond universalist. He was intoxicated by the unity of the cosmos. Man, he says, in his own narrow confines of life is like a worm burrowing within a bitter herb, ignorant of a better and greater world, beyond his little restricted domain. A human being must broaden his horizons to include the larger life, the infinite world around him, the world with which he must maintain relations. And he felt that this cosmic unity, by the way, had practical political implications for the return of the Jews to their homeland. Our relations to the Arabs, he says, must rest on cosmic foundations. Our attitude toward them must be one of humanity, of moral courage, which remains on the highest plane, even if the behavior of the other side is not all that desired.

Indeed, their hostility is all the more reason for our humanity. Challenging words for our current situation. But at the same time that he was a, beyond a universalist, a cosmic unifier, he was a passionate believer in the reality and importance of the nation. There is a cosmic element in nationality, says Gordon, which is its basic ingredient. That cosmic element may be best described as the blending of the natural landscape of the homeland with the spirit of the people inhabiting it. This is the mainspring of a people's vitality and creativity of its spiritual and cultural values. But above all, and the great contribution that Gordon made to his time, was his belief in the sanctity of labor. As he says in People in Labor, the Jewish people has been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls these 2,000 years we lack the habit of labor not labor performed out of external compulsion but labor to which one is attached in a natural and organic way this kind of labor binds the people to its soil and to its national culture and this is the notion of the conquest of labor of Kivush HaVuda that drove the second Aliyah the pioneers around Gordon and which would set the mold of Jewish national life in Israel for at least two generations to come.

Zionism, as much as we've been focused on the thoughts, really is about action. Now, Gordon shared this love of labor with the young socialists arriving around him in land, but he was no socialist himself. I want to make that clear. He rejected Marx's assertion that class struggle was the driving force of history, and he certainly rejected the anti-nationalist cosmopolitanism of the Bund. Building a nation, he says, is not like building a society. The foundation stones are laid not merely for an improved system of economic life, nor for the social justice which is desired in that life. Here, we're laying the foundation for a new collective life, and also for a new national spirituality. All this demands a profound inner unification of all the elements of the nation, where even their inner conflict, the conflict of ideas and hopes, must be internal without the interference of an alien force or alien influence.

So Gordon is rightly known as the prophet of the religion of labor. And we'll explore the power that his words held in the next episode through the details of how an entire generation came to Israel, Livnot, Uli Hibanot, to build and be built. And even in his own lifetime, Gordon became a mythic figure, a frail philosopher with a flowing beard, looking a lot like Tolstoy in the orchards of the Middle East, who labored by day, and at night taught the pioneers, who sought him out after hours of back-breaking labor, to draw inspiration from his mystic vision. And he taught them that their cleaving to the land had the status of cleaving to God himself. As I said, we'll see some of the more concrete results of Gordon's religion of labor in the coming episode, but for now I leave you with this.

Gordon's ultimate vision was one of tshuva, not in the sense of repentance, as it's used in a moral literature, but rather in its truer, deeper sense of return, return to essential self, and return to essential peoplehood, which of course is the highest repentance imaginable. And you'll forgive me the long quote, but bear it out, it's worth it. I think that every one of us ought to retreat for a moment into his innermost self, free himself from all outside influences both from those of the Gentile world and even from the influence of our own Jewish past and then ask himself with utmost simplicity seriousness and honesty what essentially is the purpose of our national movement what do we expect to find in the land of Israel that no other place can give us why should we segregate ourselves from the nations amongst whom we have lived our whole lives why leave the lands of our birth which have fashioned our personalities and so largely influenced our spirits?

Why should we not share full and unreservedly with those nations in their great work for the progress of mankind? In other words, why should we not completely assimilate ourselves amongst nations? What stops us? Surely it is not religion. In our day it is quite possible to live without any religion at all. The answer is that there is a force within every one of us which is fighting for its own life, which seeks its own realization. Jewish life in the diaspora lacks this cosmic element of national identity. It is sustained by the historic element alone which keeps us alive and will not let us die but cannot provide us with a full national life. What we have come to find only in the land of Israel is the cosmic element.

We have come to our homeland in order to be planted in our natural soil from which we have been uprooted to strike our roots deep into its life-giving substance. I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank all the people who give their hard-earned money to help make this show possible and keep it widely distributed and free. And I want to invite you to join them. Go right now to robmike.com and up in the right-hand corner you'll see a Be a Patron button. You can click on through to give a little bit of per-podcast support. I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network. That's thelandofisrael.com for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many wonderful people. And I want to invite you people to write to me.

Send me your questions. I'm already thinking about what episode or what season three might be. And I want to hear your questions. Get me at robmikefoyer.com or you can find me on Facebook at Rav Mike Foyer. I want to thank the Pardes Institute P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L for building an institution that allows me to teach such amazing Jews. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer and this is The Jewish Story. Thank you.