daniel burstyn gordon ecopsychology ma thesis.pdf

Daniel BurstynMA Thesis: Human/Nature - Insights Into the Thought of A. D. GordonGraduate Research Seminar, Dr Barry Mesch, Hebrew College

1

אקופסיכולוגיהלא.ד. גורדון בעיני ההאדם והטבע

Human/Nature - Insights Into the Thought of A. D. Gordon

A Thesis submitted to the Graduate Research Seminar of Hebrew College in

Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master's Degree in Jewish Studies

Daniel Burstyn, May 2007


2

A person, as far as s/he is human, must always be in Nature, for Nature is to the feeling and aware person just like water is to a fish. The person needs to see more than the reflection of Nature within her own soul. Rather, s/he needs the sphere of Nature, the surrounding and unifying pressure of Nature, that the endless Havayah exerts on every spot of her body and soul, that forces her to live, to be human and to be an individual in her own right; s/he needs the continuous and unmediated connection between herself and endless Nature, in order to draw the hidden nourishment that each and every atom of her body and soul draws from endless Nature and her whole self draws from the infinite; s/he needs not only consciousness and feeling, but eternal life.1

Reading Aaron David Gordon's Human and Nature awakens many of the same ideas

as reading essays and stories written almost 100 years later, by educators and social sci-

entists examining the relationships between humans and the natural environment in the

emerging field of Ecopsychology.2 Similarities abound: analysis of the human condition

in terms of natural processes, the conclusion that the source of the crisis at hand is to be

found in the disconnection of the individual from her source in nature, that the solution

to anxiety and the alienation of the individual is a return to nature in every sense: physi-

cally, mentally, and spiritually. This paper will attempt to read Gordon through the lens

of Ecopsychology, to compare Gordon's solutions to the state of the individual with

those of a number of Ecopsychologists, and to assess if the possibilities offered by Gor-

don are applicable to the universal human condition.

1 Human and Nature (האדם והטבע) – part I, Selected Writings, p. 52. The translations here are my own, unless otherwise marked. I have taken the liberty to occasionally translate the third person singular pronoun as feminine. Gordon's Hebrew, obviously, followed the convention that the third person singular is male. Central terms in Gordon's thought, such as Havayah, chavayah, etc. will be discussed at length, but for the most part left in transliteration. Havayah might be best expressed as “beingness”, but I cannot escape the fact that in Gordon's religious idiom, as in Chassidic texts, the term would also be used as a reference or placeholder for the tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God.

2 The term Ecopsychology was coined by historian Theodore Roszak. In my use of the term, I include other sub-fields, such as Environmental Psychology and Deep Ecology.


3

A. Introduction – An offer of hope in moments of despair

It was when I was a twenty-something American Jew, searching for meaning and di-

rection in my life, that I first came across the last part of chapter two of Gordon's Hu-

man and Nature, sometimes given the subtitle “Logic for the Future.”3 This is probably

the most often reprinted segment of Gordon's work, a lyrical call for a return to

“Nature,” a vision of the world to come. It is like the ending of the Aleynu prayer, which

closes every Jewish prayer service: “On that day, God will be One, and His Name will

be One.” The romantic rhetoric, the promise of a feeling of unification of body with

soul, of a return to Nature, all worked their magic on me. Like many young people be-

fore me, I was enchanted by the promise that

“when, O Man, you will return to Nature, you will open your eyes on that day and you will gaze straight into the eyes of Nature, you will see therein your own image, and you will know that you have returned to yourself, that when you have hidden from Nature, you have hidden from yourself. ... On that day, O Man, the fruit of your work will be – Life.”

Typical of millennial rhetoric, this short excerpt has found its way into a great deal

of Zionist compilations. Clearly, texts of this sort can serve the purpose of whipping up

the excitement of cadres of youth, whether Diaspora Jews arriving in Israel to volunteer

on Kibbutzim, or Israeli youth joining the Nahal Brigade of the I.D.F. One is tempted to

use the term “indoctrination.” One small fragment of Gordon's work, this is the visible

tip of an iceberg, which must be considered and critiqued.

The second paragraph of the Aleynu prayer serves an important part in the prayer ser-

vice. It is the ritual imagining of the world to come. In the morning and afternoon ser-

3 Burnce, p. 247ff., Reprinted in Hertzberg, etc. Burnce's translation changes the order of Gordon's original, placing this text at the end of Human and Nature. This may be more appropriate than leaving it sandwiched between the more philosophical sections of the work.


4

vices, it follows the Tachanun, the daily prayer of atonement, with its focus on the sins

and unworthiness of Israel. The Aleynu serves as an antidote for this self-abnegation. It

is also a reminder that we are partners with God. In a sense, it is an affirmation of faith

that even if we now have to leave God's presence (and the safety of the synagogue, for

Jews in late 19th Century Eastern Europe) for the daily grind, we hold an image of our

hopes and dreams for a perfect world.

The daily grind of the majority of Jewish youth of the early 20th Century was proba-

bly a pretty poor state of affairs. Crowded in the tenement slums of Warsaw, Krakow,

Kiev, Kishinev and Odessa, as well as London, New York and countless industrial

cities, they were losing faith in the ancient tradition, yet many had not yet gained an al-

ternative faith in what we now call urban industrial society. The few thousand youths

who had taken up the call of Zionism and made their way to Palestine in the “Second

Aliyah” were in even worse shape – though they were “taking action,”4 most of them

were hungry and literally dirt poor. They competed for work with older and more expe-

rienced Arab laborers, often accepting less than subsistence wages simply to work. They

were torn between the soup kitchens and yeshivas of the Chalukah and the boarding

houses and communes of the Chalutzim.5 Many, unable to make ends meet, returned to

4 The notion that a Jew may act to bring about the redemption is a watershed distinction between the Zionists, who declared it necessary and the Orthodox Religious establishment, who forbade it beyond the performance of day to day mitzvot. See Aberbach, p. 172: “Modern Zionism was born out of the idea that the Jews had to master their own destiny and not depend on providence, but rather reject passive faith and rabbinic authority as potential dangers. Precisely at this point, Hebrew literature emerged as an important artistic expression of modern Jewish identity and aspirations.”

5 Gordon's critique of the Chalukah in his early writing, shared by most Labor Zionists of his time, is still expressed by many Zionists today. Productivity is highly valued in Israel, even more than education. The internal struggle of the Chalutz between these two poles is best described by Yosef Chaim Brenner in his last novel, .(Breakdown and Bereavment) שכול וכשלון One of Muki Tzur's favorite tales describes how Berl Katznelson succeeded in shaking Yehuda Sharett out of deep depression, following the tragic death of his wife, by sitting with him and reading this book over three days. In spite of its depressing title and gloomy contents, about the travails of one Chanokh Chefetz,


5

their families in Europe, others emigrated to the Americas, others, literally unable to

keep body and soul together, committed suicide.

This part of Gordon's text is clearly aimed at these youths, with the same intent as the

words of the prayer – to urge them to hold on to the dream of unification, the dream of a

resolution to the dissonance of life. By holding the dream alive in the imagination, the

physical hardships of life might become bearable for a while. At the same time, Gordon

is clearly aiming higher than simple survival.

B. Human and Nature: an attempt to express a systematic philosophy

Many early 20th Century thinkers found the horrors of modern warfare, particularly

of World War I, led them to renounce European rationalism, urban industrialism, and

with it a large part of human culture. But for Gordon and other Russian Zionists, the

tribulations of the Jewish people, at the hands of anti-semitic mobs and ruthless bureau-

crats were more than enough.6 Gordon's rejection of urban industrialism was not purely

romantic, calling for a return to an idealized “nature” with no thought of the implica-

tions for industrial society. Rather, he called upon the individual, or more specifically,

Jewish individuals, who felt alienated from industrial, urban society, to seek refuge in a

very specific nature, in the natural life of farming and building the Land of Israel. From

an organic connection to this place, he said, they would be able to find a more organic

place in the world.7

who cannot seem to succeed in Palestine either as a chalutz or as a yeshiva bokher, in the end it leaves the reader with a feeling of elation. See also Schweid's discussion of the place of “Eretz Yisrael in the Zionist Experience.”

6 In this respect, they form an avant garde to certain later streams of thought. See Aberbach, ch. 9, and Sternhell, ch. 1

7 Jeremy Benstein writes: “Some years ago, I participated in a conference at Harvard University on 'Judaism and the Natural Environment.' Once there, I learned that the conference was one in a series on different religious traditions and the environment. Besides the usual faith traditions that one might


6

The promise of the return to Zion and the creation of a new Jewish person, contained

within it the more universal promise of revolution, a new world, a new human being,

and a new way of humanity's being in the world. While most of Gordon's writing was

publicistic in nature, Human and Nature attempts to expound a coherent theory of that

new way of being, his own solution to the existential questions that plagued him and his

contemporaries. His solutions draw both on western philosophy and on the Jewish tradi-

tion. In many ways, they presaged similar analyses and solutions proposed in the centu-

ry since, including ecopsychology.

C. Ecopsychology – an overview

The term Ecopsychology was coined by historian Theodore Roszak in his 1992 book

The Voice of the Earth as an attempt to merge the fields of psychology and ecology “as

an appeal to environmentalists and psychologists for a dialogue that would enrich both

fields and play a significant role in public policy.”8 Roszak was concerned with both the

negativity generated by protest-oriented environmentalism, and with the fact that there

was no rubric in the psychological vocabulary for the behavior, often described collo-

expect (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.), there was a separate conference for indigenous peoples. So, in addition to trying to figure out who got invitations to that one and why (i.e., who are indigenous peoples and what do they have in common?), I had my own gut reaction, which was, 'Hey, I want to be—I should be—with those guys!'

“My reactions at that conference stemmed from the same feeling that led me to pack up and move to Israel from the United States twenty-plus years ago. My involvement with Zionism, love of Hebrew and Israeli folk culture, and eventually my aliyah to a small pioneering kibbutz in the Arava wilderness, was a personal attempt at “reindigenization.” That is, having grown up in a typical American suburb, and not feeling “native” there, or connected to anywhere in particular, I wanted to try to root myself in a place that “made sense” for me as a Jew, that was not simply the luck of the migratory draw.

“For two thousand years, we Jews have insistently, almost pathologically, prevented ourselves from developing a deep connection to any other spot on the globe—though we have sojourned in most of them.” (Benstein, p. 207-8)

8 Roszak (2001), p. 323


7

quially as “crazy,” typical of people alienated from nature. Over the past two decades,

psychologists, educators, and theorists have gathered under this rubric, seeking solu-

tions to the neurosis, psychosis, anxiety, and alienation of life in under Western, con-

sumerist, urban-industrial materialism. They seek these in nature and wilderness. Rosza-

k's book was an attempt to “bridge the long-standing, historical gulf between the psy-

chological and the ecological, to see the needs of the planet and the person as a continu-

um.” He writes: “the ecological priorities of the planet are coming to be expressed

through our most private spiritual travail. The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing

weight of the industrial system ... is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will

free each of us to become the complete person we were born to be.”9

Like Murray Bookchin's 'social ecology,' Ecopsychology seeks a balance between a

world view that is centered on nature and one that is centered on humanity. Bookchin

points out that the eco-centric or bio-centric tendency of 'deep ecology' leads to a dan-

gerous misanthropy. “Human beings belong to a natural continuum, no less than their

primate ancestors and mammals in general. To depict them as 'aliens' ... or ... as an in-

festation that parasitizes a highly anthropomorphic version of the planet (Gaia) ... is bad

thinking, not only bad ecology.”10 We will see below that Gordon's thought grants a bal-

ance of place for both humanity and nature.

The problem of defining a place for humanity in the world is an ancient one. The

book of Genesis preserves at least two differing tales of creation. In Chapter 1, the hu-

man is created last in a series of perfect creations. In Chapter 2, however, the male hu-

9 Ibid., p. 1410 Bookchin, “What is Social Ecology?”


8

man is created before anything else, and we are told that nothing could grow, not only

for lack of water, but “there was no man to till the soil.” This story is often considered a

series of Holy trials and errors, but the human place in it is nevertheless more active

than the first. Traditional Jewish readings of these stories emphasize this ambivalence:

the Midrash reminds us that the human was created last not as the pinnacle of creation,

but as an afterthought: “should man become arrogant, he should be reminded that even

the lowly flea was created before him.” The Chassidic Rabbi Simcha Bunam of

Pshis'cha told his disciples to carry a note in each pocket, one saying “the world was

created for me” and the other saying “I am made of dust and ashes” - the first to lift de-

pressed spirits, the second to maintain humility when hubris threatens.11

Eco-critic Ursula Heise writes that although we all have an intuitive grasp of the dis-

tinction between nature and culture, it is difficult to formalize. “Most of the natural en-

vironments Westerners encounter in their own societies, at any rate, are anything but

'wild' or untouched by man--even though they may continue to strike the observer as ir-

reducibly nonhuman and other.”12 Such otherness can alienate the individual to the point

of ignoring nature or constructing a world view that defines culture and nature as mutu-

ally exclusive. Ecopsychology seeks to construct the opposite world view, one in which

the human is part of the natural world, growing organically from it, and sharing with it a

mutual responsibility.

11 Lynn White, Jr.'s well known 1967 article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (Science, 155 (10 March 1967):1203-37) elides any midrashic (or otherwise interpretive) readings of the story of creation in Genesis, and conflates the two very distinct versions. He claims that in the Christian view, inherited from Judaism, “Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature.” The response to this article is often pointed to as the beginning of Jewish Environmentalism – a movement that is framed in apologetics and proof-texts for Judaism's inherent environmental sensitivity.

12 Heise, “Science and Ecocriticism”


9

At the end of his book, Roszak defines eight principles of ecopsychology, as a

“guide, suggesting how deep that listening must go to hear the Self that speaks through

the self.”

1. The core of the mind is the ecological unconscious.

2. The contents of this ecological unconscious represent the living record of evolution. The therapeutic work of ecopsychology draws upon them, healing by making them real to experience.

3. The goal of ecopsychology is to awaken the inherent sense of environmental reciprocity that lies within the ecological unconscious.

4. As in other therapies, the crucial stage of development is the life of the child.

5. The ecological ego matures towards a sense of ethical responsibility with the planet.

6. Re-evaluation of certain “masculine” character traits that drive us to dominate nature.

7. Small scale social forms and personal empowerment nourish the ecological ego.

8. There is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being.13

Ecopsychology seeks a transpersonal approach to nature. John Davis says it recog-

nizes “a fundamentally non-dual, seamless unity in which both nature and psyche flow

as expressions of the same absolute source.”14 Gordon's conception of the individual,

quoted above, as a drop in the “sea of life,” is strikingly similar.

13 Abridged from Ibid., p. 320-32114 Davis, 1998. Davis is a professor of Environmental Psychology at Naropa University.


10

D. Gordon's Life: Intoxicated with Nature?15

Aaron David Gordon was born in 1856 in Troyano, in southern Podolia, a province

of Russian Poland, now in Ukraine. His father held a post as a clerk in a country estates

of Baron Horace Günzburg, who was a distant cousin. As a relative of the Baron, he

had special permission to live in the countryside, though most Jews were confined by

Czarist decree to the towns. Aaron was the last of five children born, but the only one to

survive infancy. He was a sickly child, and his parents were very protective and hired

private tutors to educate him. As a teenager he spent some time in a Yeshiva at Vilna.

When he came of age, he insisted on being drafted into the Russian army, though he

was released after a few months as unfit to serve. Eventually, he too worked as a clerk

and financial manager in the Günzburg estates, at Mogilno. He was unable to obtain

permission to live there, however, and was forced to commute to work daily, usually

walking several miles through the countryside. This was a rare situation for someone of

his class in that time and place, and presumably gave Gordon valuable time outdoors

that he may not have had otherwise.16

Gordon married Fayge Tartakov when he was in his early 20s. Their daughter Yael

was born in 1881 and her brother Yehiel Michal a year later. In a tragic replay of Gor-

don's own childhood, several more children did not survive infancy. In spite of his own

lifelong poor health, Gordon was very active in the Jewish community of Mogilno,

helping found schools, a library and regularly preaching in the synagogue. He was

15 The material here was gathered from the biographical material in the sources listed in sections A and B of the bibliography. The most extensive and apparently accurate biography of Gordon appears in Dr. Einat Ramon's dissertation.

16 What Gordon's work consisted of is not entirely clear. Hamutal Bar Yosef hints that he also spent some time working in the Günzberg family library in St. Petersburg. See note 47.


11

known especially for his work with youth, for whom he organized many activities, in-

cluding reading clubs and intellectual salons. He was a voracious reader, and an auto-di-

dact. He taught himself three European languages, biology and botany, and other fields

as he needed. In order to better teach his own children, his daughter Yael reported that

he spent an entire year studying the Bible with the traditional commentaries. Neverthe-

less, he did not publish any writing during this period of his life, nor are there many

more known details. In addition to the brief biographical sketch by Yosef Aharonowitz,

and memoirs of Gordon's daughter Yael, one letter to historian and Zionist Simon Dub-

now written in 1898 is all that exists from this period of Gordon's life. After 23 years,

the Günzburg's sold their Mogilno estate, and Gordon was out of work. In the months

that followed, both his parents died.

It was at this juncture (1904) that Gordon decided to uproot himself and make aliyah

to Eretz Yisrael. Everywhere he had lived he had been active in the community, and

sympathetic to Zionist causes, raising money for Hibbat Zion, and allowing his house to

become a gathering place for young people in search of spiritual support and intellectual

stimulation. In spite of his age of 48 upon arriving in Palestine, Gordon chose the life of

a Chalutz, an agricultural laborer. He lived first in Rehovot, and worked wherever he

could. In 1908, he was stabbed by an Arab bandit, and very nearly lost his life. This

event somewhat shook his resolve, and led him to recognize that the Zionist myth of “a

land without a people for a people without a land” was false. He later wrote that those

who inherit the land in the long run will be the “people that shows they most suffered

for it.”


12

After his wife and daughter joined him towards the end of the decade, they made a

home in the workers' cooperative village of Ein Ganim, near Petach Tikva. There, in

1910, tragedy struck, in the form of a serious illness that killed Fayge Gordon. Her hus-

band had nursed her through her illness, and nursed their daughter Yael to health, while

mourning Fayge's death. Soon after, a box containing much of his personal effects was

stolen from him, including his only mementos of his wife.

It was only in 1912 that he moved to the Galilee, where he worked in various loca-

tions until the end of the First World War. The news of his son Yechiel's death from ty-

phoid only reached him after the war's end. Gordon worked in many of the seminal agri-

cultural cooperatives of Palestine, including Migdal, Segera, Tel Adashim, and Kin-

neret.At Kinneret he shared a room with Berl Katznelson, who was greatly influenced

by him. The settlement with which his name is most closely associated is Degania

Aleph, the first kibbutz, although he only settled there in 1919, after receiving a person-

al invitation from the members. Gordon died three years later, of esophageal cancer.

In his years in Eretz Yisrael, Gordon wrote and published extensively, on both politi-

cal and philosophical themes. His philosophical work, Human and Nature, was begun in

Ein Ganim, and the first two chapters were published in 1909 and 1913, including the

lyrical passage mentioned above. He never completed this attempt to systematize his

thought, though he worked on it again in his last years. Aharonowitz relates in a foot-

note that Gordon told him he intended to write two more chapters, one on religion and

nature, and the other on women and nature.


13

Gordon's energetic and optimistic personality became more important and better

known than his writing. Most of his contemporaries of the Second Aliyah valued his

ability as a propagandist, and his followers of the Third and Fourth Aliyot (1917-1928)

idolized him for his personal example as an “enlightened peasant.” In present-day Israel

studies, his political, publicistic works get more focus than his philosophical work, to

the point that historian Ze'ev Sternhell can paint him in almost fascist colors, as the

propagator of one of the first Founding Myths of Israel, that of an organic nationalism,

anti-liberal and almost anti-humanist. Sadly, the mythical image of the old man with the

hoe, dancing the hora with the young chalutzim, seems to be Gordon's most lasting

legacy. In the wider Jewish world, he is barely known outside the Zionist youth move-

ments. In the 1959 reader The Zionist Idea that remains the primary collection of prima-

ry Zionist texts, Arthur Herzberg called Gordon “the heterodox Hasidic master of the

Labor-Zionist movement.” Like the Hasidic masters, in life Gordon was considered

more of a teacher than an ideologue, and following his death he was canonized into a

figure larger than life. But he was not strictly a socialist, and was especially critical of

Orthodox Marxism. Gordon's philosophical thought, if known, has been widely misun-

derstood and stereotyped as the “religion of labor.”17 This is a term Gordon himself nev-

er used, and likely would have discouraged, preferring to say that his religion was “Life

itself.”18

17 Schweid, היחיד, p. 7 Gordon's departure from the socialist commune at Tel Adashim was precipitated by an argument over the celebration of the first of May: Upon the decision of the general meeting that all members would be required to celebrate the “workers' holiday,” Gordon ceremoniously stood up and walked out.

18 Selected Writings, p. 134: “Pure natural life, life within Nature and with Nature, life that is the complete expression, both spiritual and intellectual, of the highest emotional unity – this is the true Religion.”


14

Survey of Literature

i. Gordon's Writings

The written work of A. D. Gordon was first collected and published in a chronologi-

cal fashion by his friend and editor Yosef Aharonowitz in the late 1920s. It remains the

definitive collection of his works19. A one volume abridgment was published by Nah-

man Teradyon and Eliezer Shochat in the 1930s. A subsequent three volume collection,

edited by Shochat and Shmuel Hugo Bergman was published in the 1950s, but has been

criticized, especially for the editors' thematic rearrangement of the material and their ad-

dition of subheadings in the margins of Human and Nature. In spite of this criticism, a

third edition, abridged to one volume by Eliezer Schweid, used the same plates, main-

taining both the subheadings and the thematic arrangement. Einat Ramon points out that

Bergman and Shohat's editorial choices hide from the reader the fragmented nature of

Human and Nature. In spite of being presented here as a unified project, the first two

chapters were published separately, ending with the emotional and prophetic sounding

passage “Logic for the Future.” In the following years, Gordon wrote a number of im-

portant pieces, notably the essay “Eternity and the Moment,” and only returned to the

work on Human and Nature in his last years.20 Gordon's letters were mostly collected in

the second edition of his works, and recently republished, with comments and additions,

by Muki Tzur in 1990.

Gordon's work has never been adequately translated. Translations of Teradyon's

abridged collection were made in both German (1937), and English (1938). The English

19 See Schweid, Shapira, and Ramon20 Ramon 2001, p. 15-16


15

version was published by the League for Labor Palestine. The translation is by Frances

Burnce. Unfortunately, in this version, Human and Nature does not present the material

in Gordon's original order, rather, it breaks up the first two chapters, placing the “Logic

for the Future” section after a fiercely abridged version of the rest of the work. In addi-

tion, liberties taken throughout the translation elide much of Gordon's original meaning.

A number of essays from this volume were published in 1959 in Arthur Herzberg's The

Zionist Idea, and remain the only examples of Gordon's work available in English.

II. Scholarship

Though the body of Gordon's work was first collected and published in the late

1920s, little critical scholarship on it was undertaken until several decades later. The

textual material available from before the 1960s is primarily in the form of memoirs,

reminiscences, hagiographical biographies, and indoctrinational material from the vari-

ous Zionist youth movements.21 In the words of Muki Tzur:

Those who attempted to translate his words for the era of the 1950s and 60s, those years of political potboiling, of the fights over communism, fascism, over assimilation and nationalism, found them difficult and preferred to skip over many of the obstacles that Gordon built. Those who fit him into foreign intellectual categories were the butt of criticism of those who wished to preserve him as the greatest mind of a generation.22

A. Bergman

These last remarks may refer to the attempt to analyze Gordon's work by philoso-

pher and librarian Shmuel Hugo Bergman, who also edited the second edition of Gor-

don's collected works. Bergman's introductory essay to the second volume of that edi-

21 Not the least of these movements was the short lived, eponymous Gordonia, which was responsible for the founding of a dozen kibbutzim during its thirteen year existence.

22 Tzur 1998, p. 7 (my translation).


16

tion attempts to place Gordon in the flow of western philosophical thought. Bergman

tried to map out the relationships between Gordon's work and that of western philoso-

phers like Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. Although others, especially Schweid and Avra-

ham Shapira, show that Gordon's language is primarily religious, the secular connec-

tions Bergman draws to psychology, especially the depth psychology of Carl Jung and

Erich Neumann, are important.

Bergman points out that Gordon's view of religion did not differentiate between par-

ticularistic and universal religion. From Gordon's point of view, all religions are nation-

alist ideologies. Bergman writes: “He justifies... the nations who complain of the loss of

their national religion and rebel against a Christianity that took their national religion

from them, and sees in that one of the roots of antisemitism.”23 Religion, like language,

is the 'spiritiual fruit of the nation.' The religion of Israel aspired to that framework from

its very roots, Bergman says, concluding that this conception of Judaism prevented Gor-

don from seeing some of its basic concepts. Bergman then goes on to point out

Krochmal's argument in this case – since Israel recognizes no God other than the God of

the nations, the “God of Israel” is different from the local deity of each nation. This cord

binds Gordon's thought to that of other European nationalists of the time, clearly a dubi-

ous distinction in the dark days following World War II. What Bergman fails to note,

that can be seen in subsequent scholarship, is the implications that this brand of nation-

alism has for Gordon's philosophy of Nature.24 In the grand tradition of Jewish mysti-

23 Second Edition, vol. II, p. 3124 See Sternhell and Aberman.


17

cism stretching back at least to Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi of medieval Spain, Gordon af-

firms a mystical connection between the individual Jewish soul and the Land of Israel.

Gordon's view of the self is very similar to that of Jung, according to Bergman. Ac-

cording to Jung, he points out, the ego floats on the unconscious like an island in the

sea. The same layers of the soul that make up this “sea,” contain not only those elements

that were once part of the individual, as Freud taught, but also elements that were never

consciously contained in the life of the individual. Furthermore, Jung says that the con-

scious ego rebels against human nature. “More correctly: it is not the human that rebels

against nature, rather from this moment forward there are in the human self two 'natures'

that fight one another,” writes Bergman.25 This process repeats itself in the developmen-

tal process of each individual:

“In the soul humans will discover vast hidden strengths, that will enrich the lives of people and will bring them to advances in internal culture, as great as those of science and technics.” “In this sense, Gordon equated,” according to his daughter, “the whole of humanity with the individual, who before all else learns to know, in the dawn of his life, the outside world, his surroundings, while ignoring his own private world and only in his forties, having gained real life experience in those surroundings, begins to pay attention to the self, to his inner world.”26

25 Op. cit., vol. II, p1926 Ibid. p.20, quoting from a memoir by Yael Gordon.

Both Gordon and Jung probably believed in Haekel's theory of strong recapitulation, which held sway until quite recently. Probably Bergman also held this evolutionary theory to be scientific fact. The implications of recapitulation on philosophical understanding of human development and human history seem to have always been held as fact, long before the beginnings of 19th Century Evolutionary Science.

Evan Eisenberg suggests that Oedipus's interpretation of the riddle of the sphinx indicates the ancient source of the beginning of the mix up. The Sphinx, he says, spoke of phylogeny. In this reading, the crutch can be seen as technology in general. Oedipus, according to Eisenberg, was too self centered to think of anything but ontogeny:

“By applying the parable to one man's lifetime, Oedipus was able to dodge its cautionary point. [The Sphinx's] worst fears were soon realized, for Oedipus, having denied his origin in Mother Earth, was now free to violate her. To stifle our guilt about penetrating our mother, we deny that she is our mother. If peoples that take up plow agriculture give up the worship of the Great Mother, it may be from shame over their rape of her.” (Eisenberg, p65)

A similar concept to recapitulation occurs in the kabbalistic literature in the form of the quotation: “As above, so below” - which is understood by the kabbalists to mean that the internal workings of the


18

For Bergman, the main similarity between these two theories lies in their differentia-

tion between two loci of the internal life of the individual. Gordon's concept of

Havayah, then, is equated to Jung's “collective unconscious,” and Jung's understanding

of the process of individuation is the same as what Gordon calls tzimtzum. I discuss

these terms at length below.

Bergman quotes here from some of Gordon's most messianic statements, ones that

speak of humanity's great future, of a time when “man will find and delve into the trea-

sures buried in his soul, and then the hidden light will blaze forth and enlighten and im-

prove human relations until they reach the level of a new heaven and a new earth...”27

While this messianic tendency in Gordon's writing may be typical of early 20th century

discourse, it doesn't seem to deserve Bergman's notice. I have already proposed some of

the motivations I believe underly this type of language, and will address them further,

below.

Bergman also discusses Gordon's ethics. Contrary to Jung and particularly his

student Erich Neumann,28 who attacked the traditional concept of ethics on the grounds

that they enslave the soul by “discipline, obedience, punishments and suffering”,

Gordon's ethics is not one of enslavement or suffering, rather one of expansion.

Gordon's concept of hitpashtut (expansion) explains ethical behavior as a result of the

expansion of the self to include the other. This should be differentiated from standard

Kantian ethics, where identification of the self and other stop short of inclusion. For

individual are a reflection of the workings of God, according to some, or of the heavenly hosts, according to others.

Haekel also coined the term “ecology.”27 Ibid.28 Neumann escaped Germany following the rise of the Nazis, and practiced psychoanalysis in Tel Aviv

until his death in 1960.


19

Gordon, when the self experiences this expansion to the point that it includes the other,

then it will want to act ethically, since the pain of the other becomes the self's own pain.

In a letter quoted by Bergman in this discussion, Gordon restates a famous Chasidic

dictum: “אין השכינה שורה אלא מתוך שמחה של מצוה" – “The Shekhinah only fills [a

soul] through the joy of mitzvah.” Bergman explains this cornerstone of Gordon's world

view thus: “instead of the accepted distinction between good and evil, Gordon

distinguished between a life of expansion and a life of contraction.” Gordon claims that

the choice is not between good and evil, but is no less than the choice between these two

ways of life. In a life of contraction the individual's will is limited, while “the extent to

which his life expands, the individual is aware not only with conscious awareness,

rather primarily with an experiential and vital awareness of the unity of universal being

and all its discoveries, to the extent that the individual lives actively from within himself

into universal life, that is the extent to which the individual's will itself will expand, to

encompass everything ... truly becoming free will.”29 Thus, ethical behavior is not a

choice in and of itself, but the result of the choice of expansion over contraction.

B. Schweid

Professor Eliezer Schweid can be called the dean of Gordon studies today; much of

his early work was dedicated to Gordon's thought and he continues to teach and pro-

mote a 'Gordonian' philosophy. In 1970, Schweid published the first scholarly analysis

of Gordon's work, היחיד (The World of A.D. Gordon). By following Bergman's psycho-

logical-philosophical focus, Schweid only scratches the surface of that element of Gor-

don's message that is bound in his use of religious language. Nevertheless, in his book,

29 Op. cit., p. 21- 22


20

and his subsequent essays on Gordon, Schweid thoroughly systematizes Gordon's

thought. Schweid traces Gordon's thought as it progresses from the individual outward

through the concentric circles of family, community, nation and Nature.

Most recently, Schweid's brief study of the place of “Eretz Yisrael in the Zionist Ex-

perience” examines Gordon's work using a discourse very similar to that of ecopsychol-

ogy. Here, Schweid attempts to disentangle the “textual memory map” of Eretz Yisrael

that Gordon brought with him from Russia and identify the “ideological charge” that

brought him to make Aliyah. “He saw himself making Aliyah like Rabbi Yehudah

HaLevi, and understood the meaning of Eretz Yisrael as the homeland of the Jewish

people from a similarly religious point of view, though he expressed it in modern philo-

sophical language.” In his Kuzari, HaLevi wrote of a unique quality in the physical land

of Israel that differentiated it from other lands, just as the people of Israel were different

from other peoples, both, by virtue of a special relationship with God, which also tied

them one to another. Thus, only when the people of Israel are living in Eretz Yisrael and

practicing the additional mitzvot connected to it, can the land come to its full fruition.

Schweid says that Gordon's philosophical interpretation of this trys to blunt its inherent

chauvinism, and to reconcile it with a more universal humanism. Rather than erasing

any other such naturalist nationalisms, Schweid reads Gordon as applying HaLevi's cos-

mic chauvinism to all nationalisms – each land has its own people, and will reach its

fullest fruition when they are united.30

30 It is not the intention of this paper to compare Gordon's mystical nationalism with that of others, throughout Europe, who called on their compatriots to renew their bonds to an ancestral homeland, whether it be Finland, Serbia, or Palestine. The similarity should not go unnoticed, however. For an interesting discussion of a similar nationalism, written with an awareness of both ecological and psychological implications, see Applegate, Celia, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).


21

Schweid breaks up Gordon's conception of Nature into three forms: aesthetic-roman-

tic, scientific, and experiential-religious. All three, he says, served Gordon in his work.

The first two are the more common forms of conception, and depend on the objectifying

lens of hakarah (simply understood as conscious thought – see below). Though most

people see Nature as existing only in one of these two forms, without the third, they

constitute an external view of nature, and thus cannot lead to a true “return to Nature.”

A true human return to Nature happens only through the joint creativity of the Human

and the Natural, “in other words the channeling of the human's physical and spiritual

powers of creativity into Nature, in order to produce everything the spiritual and materi-

al fertility can...”31 Sharing HaLevi's focus on the mitzvot of Eretz Yisrael, Gordon

translated their holiness into the more general commandment of working in Nature,

working the land. Through such work, done with “pure intentions,” recycling the holi-

ness of Nature through the work of the body, into the land, and back again, the chalutz

can simultaneously solve the problems of personal, national, and universal exile. Ac-

cording to Schweid's reading of Gordon, in this sense, the 'Torah of Labor' is the

essence of Zionism, even of Judaism itself, and its universal message to humanity.

C. Shapira

Abraham Shapira, founding editor of the influential journal Shdemot, takes Schweid's

work a step farther, into the depths of Jewish Studies, by examining Gordon's use of tra-

ditional Jewish language, particularly that of Kabbalah and Chassidism. Though Gor-

don's family background was of the mitnagdim, and his exposure to Chassidism was

negative by the accounts of his daughter Yael and of Aharonowitz, Gordon's language

31 Ibid., p. 253


22

adopts many chassidic idioms. Indeed, his contribution to Modern Hebrew, the word

is based in ,(chavayah – now used to mean “experience” in the intransitive sense) חוויה

the form ה.ו.י.ה, a term often used as a euphemism for the tetragrammaton in Chassidic

and Kabbalistic texts. Thus, Shapira sees Gordon's thought as growing organically from

the traditional-historic corpus of Jewish thought, rather than being built from the bricks

of Western Thought, as Bergman tried to claim.

One relationship Shapira specifically examines is with the Chassidim of Bratzlav. He

relates that author Yehuda Ya'ari, who knew Gordon personally, was convinced that

Gordon had been a Bratzlaver Chassid before his Aliyah to Eretz Yisrael, “on account

of his vocabulary, his modes of expression, and his melodies.”32

D. Amir

Yehoyada Amir, a student of Schweid and colleague of Shapira in the “Shdemot cir-

cle,”33 offers important translations of Gordon's central concepts in a chapter on the cen-

trality of pedagogy in Gordon's thought. Together with Einat Ramon's work, Amir's

chapter is the only recently published English work that addresses Gordon's thought on

its own terms.34 While Ramon maintains the Hebrew terms to discuss Gordon's unique

language, Amir provides translations. Of particular importance are his reading of

32 Shapira, p. 86, note 26: “Tzvi Tzameret tells of a conversation in which Y. Ya'ari said even more than this: 'Gordon's life up until his Aliyah has not been researched enough. In my opinion, he was a Bratzlaver Chassid. And why do I say so? From his vocabulary, his mode of expression, and his niggunim.”(Tzvi Tzameret, “Conversations with Yehuda Ya'ari, Davar, Dec. 14, 1982)

33 A group of Labor Zionist intellectuals, many of them kibbutzniks, who gathered around the editorial board of Shdemot in the late 1960s. Others in this group include Yariv Ben Aharon, Muki Tzur, and Amos Oz. Their most influential work was שיח לוחמים (published in English as The Seventh Day), a collection of narratives and discussions by Israeli soldiers following the Six Day War.

34 As mentioned above, Sternhell's important work only examines Gordon's nationalist thought, and ignores his legacy of caring and close personal relationships. Schweid has published articles in English that mention Gordon in the context of Zionism and Prophetic Mysticism, but not exclusively. See Bibliography.


23

chavayah and hakarah, the two terms Gordon uses to describe two methods of obtain-

ing knowledge, or two types of knowledge. Amir translates chavayah as 'life perception'

and hakarah – 'cognition.' These terms will be discussed at length below. I think Amir's

translations raise problems, however: in ecologically sensitive fields, the term 'cogni-

tion' immediately raises negative connotations – it echoes with Descartes's famous dec-

laration and all the accusations surrounding the rise of Cartesian dualism. Much ecolog-

ical thought places responsibility for the 17th Century narrowing of the scope of scientif-

ic study from the universal to the measurable on Descartes head, so I prefer to leave

hints of his work out of my discourse.35 I prefer the translation 'conscious awareness' for

another reason as well – it is closest to the modern Hebrew usage of the term chavayah,

and indicates a state that is neither entirely passive nor entirely active. I read chavayah

as existing in an intermediate realm between activity and stasis – Gordon clearly uses it

in both ways. Amir's translation 'life experience' fits too easily onto the identical English

term, with its cumulative connotation. In Hebrew, that is rendered in entirely different

language.36 Thus I have chosen to follow Ramon, and render Gordon's terms in translit-

eration.

A more recent article by Amir addresses directly the issue of Nature by examining

Gordon's approaches to Eretz Yisrael and its landscape. Amir points out that in his dis-

cussions of Nature, Gordon rarely discusses any landscape specifically. The landscape

of Palestine, as alien and harsh as it seemed when he first saw it, was the Nature, the

physical substrate, of the Jewish people, as Gordon saw it. The people had been “torn”

35 See Eisenberg, p. 305 “that Descartes who gets blamed dozens of times a day for parting thought from emotion, mind from body, and man from nature – [was a mystic].”

36 ”from the root also meaning “to test ,(nisayon) ניסיון


24

from Nature, and sent into exile. They must be replanted in the soil of the land of Israel.

This “tear” was not from the woods and fields of Podolia or any other land of the exile,

but from the land that has given birth to the nation to begin with, before the exile. It was

the exile that had forced on them suffering, passivity, and parasitic behavior. The work

of the Zionist movement was to a) reawaken the nation of Israel in b) the Land of Israel,

speaking c) the language of Israel. This obviously gradual work would also affect

change in those Jews who would remain outside of Eretz Yisrael: they would also even-

tually lose the feeling of exile. Gordon's thought was that they, too, would adopt a life

of work in nature, eventually living in other lands as any other ethnic minority.

Amir points out here the importance of Gordon's idea of עם-אדם – Human/Nation –

the organic national unit that is the natural progression beyond the family and before

Nature itself. “The meaning of 'Am-adam is two-fold. Inwardly: the people that is made

up of individuals living a life of expansion, expressing their independence, and working

from a place of responsibility and according to scales of justice and solidarity with oth-

ers.”37 Outwardly, it is the radical requirement that the people behave toward other na-

tions according to the same criteria. The Human/Nation, like the Human individual, is

created in God's image. Some, like Sternhell, have elided the ethical command of this

statement, reading this as supporting a chauvinistic, Judeo-centric idea of chosenness.

Amir reads Gordon as saying that a nation living a true life of expansion in its own

landscape, must have the highest ethical behavior. “'Am-adam ... is the polar opposite of

a national public living according to its narrowest individual interests, and enshrining

37 Amir, “ארץ טבע ואדם,” p. 344, my translation.


25

them, the opposite of living the life of contraction that is gross nationalism, the opposite

of the tendency to use the concept of 'me and no other' to justify politics and policy.”38

E. Ramon

Rabbi Einat Ramon's Doctoral Dissertation, “God, The Mother: A Critique of Domi-

nation” is the most recent comprehensive scholarly work on Gordon. Already in her in-

troductory comments, she delineates major themes which Gordon shares with feminist

thought: maternal behavior as a paradigm for ethics, female God-language, and his cri-

tique of domination. The connection of feminist philosophy and theology to ecology has

been clearly marked by scholars such as Susan Griffin, Carolyn Merchant, and others in

the growing field of eco-feminism. Irene Diamond and David Seidenberg have explored

Judaism from an eco-feminist perspective.

Ramon shows how Gordon's thought prefigures the feminist critique of power and

domination, a theme shared by many exponents of ecopsychology. “Zionist and femi-

nist tropes rejected Father-God symbolism and employed a cluster of feminine symbols

such as earth, land, nature and motherhood.”39 Gordon's intuition of connectedness and

its anti-hierarchical implications are central to Ramon's thesis.

In her second chapter, “The Land of My Fathers is My Mother”, Ramon examines

the feminization of Zion as a general cultural image in the beginning of the Zionist

movement, and points to Gordon's exclusive use of that image in his descriptions of the

land. “The metaphor of return to the mother thus symbolized in his works not only the

38 Ibid.39 Ramon, p. 1


26

Zionist unification with Zion, but a return to the value of unification and attachment.”40

Ramon further states:

Thus, Gordon's metaphorical Zionist statement that the Nature of the Land of Israel could teach us Torah is reinforced through the following claims: Firstly, that historically the Hebrews' encounters with the landscape of Israel led them to crystallize their unique conception of the divine and to develop a religion inspired by those encounters. Secondly, that the Talmudic model of Jewish religiosity, based mostly on studying legal texts and communal prayer, had distanced Judaism from those initial moments of revelation. And, lastly that a renewed sensual connection between the Jewish People and the landscape from which their nation emerged could provide them with new insights regarding their understanding of the Divine. What follows from his doctrine is the assumption that morally, spiritually and intellectually, such an intimate relationship between the Jewish People and the Land could also lead the Jews to reinterpret the record of their historical revelation, namely the Torah.41

Gordon's environmental concerns are discussed in the fifth part of this chapter, where

she points out that in spite of concern for environmental degradation caused by industri-

al and urban development, Gordon never addressed what actions were destructive and

what were positive. “While warning [about the possible destruction of nature by alienat-

ed human action], he did not set out the parameters for ecological behavior that

stemmed from this concern.”42 This analysis will provide an opening to critique the lim-

itations of Gordon's environmental sensitivity, limitations that he shared with rural ro-

mantics throughout the world at the beginning of the 20th Century.

F. Muki Tzur

In the introduction to the 1998 edition of his collection of letters to and from Gordon,

historian and storyteller Muki Tzur points out that the changes in the landscape of Israel

since Gordon worked it have been immense. "The Land of Israel about which Gordon

40 Ramon., p. 6641 Ibid., p. 6942 Ibid., p. 71


27

wrote during his lifetime has disappeared and is no more. It is no longer the poor desert

land, thirsting and hungering for development ... without the Hebrew language. Never-

theless, the landscape that changed so dramatically did not succeed in magically trans-

forming the Jewish individual.”43 For Tzur, this is a sign that Gordon's analysis was

wrong, particularly regarding the place of the individual in the field of politics and pow-

er. It is regarding Gordon's theories of Human and Nature, however, that Tzur finds a

continuing relevance: “How can the human as consumer maintain his authenticity? And

how can a Jew, who finds in the State of Israel a possibility of world citizenship, mold

his Jewish Identity?” For Tzur, Gordon's solution to these problems is based in self-edu-

cation.

G. Uri Gordon

Dr. Uri Gordon, a young Israeli academic and activist, shared with me a paper he

wrote about Gordon's ecological philosophy during postgraduate study at Tel Aviv Uni-

versity. His paper lays out a framework for considering the philosophy of A.D. Gordon

in comparison with the philosophy of “Deep Ecology,” as expressed first by Norwegian

philosopher Arne Naess.44

The unique point of A.D. Gordon's philosophy is the emphasis on the centrality of

the human in his conception of Nature. “Neither humanity nor the individual self can

exist ... without taking into account the ... systems of being ... which constitute their in-

ner essence.”45 Thus, even when the traditional understanding of the hierarchy of cre-

43 Tzur (1998), p. 844 Uri Gordon went on to write his doctoral dissertation at Oxford in Philosophy, Politics and

Economics, initially intending to examine the topic of A.D. Gordon further, but he rejected that topic for analysis of the anarchist and anti-globalization movement.

45 Uri Gordon, p. 7


28

ation, in which the human is the pinnacle, is considered, it is only within the network of

being that surrounds it. Whether this reasoning emerges directly from A.D. Gordon's

Jewish roots, or from his knowledge of Spinoza and later thinkers who grappled with

the place of humanity in Nature, it places his thought in a unique place in environmental

philosophy.

Like many environmental thinkers, A.D. Gordon calls for a revision of all aspects of

human existence. But unlike many Deep Ecologists, who seek to limit, and the case of

the radical Earth First! Movement, reverse, human activity, A.D. Gordon's thought

takes a much more human-centric view, one that seeks to heal both the human and Na-

ture, by returning the human to Nature. A.D. Gordon's return to Nature, Uri Gordon

writes, is “nothing but the expansion of the self such that it will contain nature in its en-

tirety and cease to see it as external.”46

III. On the structure of this work

It is my intention to interpret Gordon's work in the frame of Ecopsychology. I dis-

covered in the course of my reading that Gordon's personal suffering led him to a posi-

tion of empathy for the suffering and alienation of his younger contemporaries. Further-

more, it was primarily his experience of the solace he found in Nature that led him to

valorize it. His difficulties in acclimatizing to the conditions of Eretz Yisrael seem to

have led him to realize that the simple use of nature imagery would not be successful,

and eventually to adopt a more rationalist, abstract idea of Nature.

In order to better understand Gordon's work, I first read his approach to human na-

ture. This is perhaps the most important part of his legacy – the creation of a modern

46 Uri Gordon, p. 23


29

Hebrew language to discuss the self. Like his contemporaries, Asher Ginzburg (Echad

Ha'am) and Chaim Nachman Bialik, Gordon insisted on writing his philosophical works

in Hebrew, even though many of the chalutzim (and even more of the active Zionists in

Europe) were not fluent in the Holy tongue. Gordon's unique contribution is his creation

of a language that grew both from traditional Rabbinic thought and from European phi-

losophy. He coined terms, he set some of them in pairs: Havayah and chavayah,

hasagah and hakarah, tzimtzum and hitpashtut. He adopted terms from Rabbinic

sources and applied them to the modern situation, and he used traditional metaphors in a

way that translated them into the secular vernacular. Nine of these terms are examined

in detail. Gordon's thought as expounded in Human and Nature remains the focus, rely-

ing on his other works to a lesser extent.

Following the rubric of Ecopsychology suggested by Davis, Gordon's metaphors for

Nature are examined and compared with those of practitioners today. Gordon uses a

wealth of abstract Nature imagery, some of it universal, some of it typically Jewish. Ra-

mon's focus on Gordon's feminization of Eretz Yisrael serves as a guide here, leading

into a discussion of Gordon's metaphors for the Land. Gordon's own struggles upon his

arrival to Israel are examined in this context. I suggest that his move from concrete na-

ture imagery to abstraction suggests a sensitivity to the pain of separation from the land-

scape of childhood. Following Tzur, I see this as an attempt to discourage over-romanti-

cization of the Zionist experience. Continuing with Davis's rubric, I examine Gordon's

approach to duality in the self. Gordon's philosophical approach to religion is consid-

ered, specifically his neo-Hegelian understanding of the roots of Judaism. This is fol-


30

lowed by a study of the Jewish traditions of duality that fed Gordon's thought, in the

context of modern history.

The chalutzim mostly broke with Jewish practice upon arrival in Eretz Yisrael. Like

others, Gordon struggled with his Jewish practice, and with their externalities. But un-

like writers such as Berdyczewski, Bialik and Brenner, he had a positive identification

with his Judaism. His Jewishness was more than the sum of the mitzvot he performed.

He saw changes in practice as required by the renewal of the Jewish presence in Eretz

Yisrael, and gradually became more secular, moving from what Schweid calls “pre-

scribed” religious practice, to “free” religion. A brief discussion of what Aldous Huxley

called the “perennial philosophy” end this section.

Next examined are Gordon's prescriptions for the healing of the alienated self. He of-

ten repeats, as in the quote on page 1, that the individual must constantly “live in Na-

ture.” But did he make practical prescriptions? Unification of the self with the Universe

can hardly be as simple as walking outside, can it?

Critique of Gordon's thought first examines it's roots in Romanticism, rather than ra-

tionalism, using Isaiah Berlin's two hallmarks of Romantic thought. These are a focus

on individual will as a measure of value, and an insistence on flow and formlessness.

Evan Eisenberg's explanation of the Arcadian myth as a basis of Romantic nationalism

is also considered. The roots of Gordon's thought in ancient Jewish tradition seem to

suggest that the Romantic – Rational polarity is a false one. Furthermore, the traits

shared by Gordon's thought with ecopsychology point to a shared intellectual tradition,

no less venerable or valuable than rational thought.


31

Gordon's ethics are considered within the field of ecological ethics. As suggested by

Uri Gordon, A. D. Gordon's ethics can be a useful bridge between the poles of 'deep'

and 'shallow' ecology, because of his insistence on the necessity of maintaining a hu-

man-centered world view. I believe that a sensitivity like Gordon's to the internal strug-

gles of the individual is central to any environmental ethics. This discussion leads natu-

rally into a brief examination of Ecopsychology practice, based as it is in the same field

of thought where Gordon would be very much at home.

Chapter 1: Human Nature

Gordon's primary thesis in Human and Nature shares with Davis the idea of the

“deeply bonded and reciprocal relationship between humans and nature.” In order to

more closely examine this thesis, I will begin by considering his understanding of hu-

man nature: the self, its parts and behaviors. The relationship between the individual

and the land, its inhabitants, and Nature as a whole, is dependent on the conception of

the self. In order to express his thoughts about this, Gordon largely created his own ter-

minology. Much of the extant scholarship on Gordon examines the Jewish roots of his

terminology and the internal world he uses it to describe. Gordon's terms, for the most

part, come in pairs: Chavayah and Havayah, Hasagah and Hakarah, etc.

(Havaya - being) הויה and (chavaya - experiencing) חויה

Scholars have wondered whether Gordon, a child of the woods and fields of Podolia,

was influenced by Tolstoy and other Russian proponents of a “back to Nature” ideolo-

gy, and to what extent.47 What is certain is that Gordon translated at least one of Tol-

47 It may be that they were both part of the same wave of Russian reaction to modernity. See Hamutal Bar Yosef's “Zionism As Seen Against the Background of Russian Culture.” In a note to that essay, Bar Yosef mentions a possible connection between Gordon and Vladimir Solovyov, the religious


32

stoy's works, “What is Art?”48, the introduction to which was later published separately

as “On the Difference Between Judaism and Christianity,” in which Gordon explains a

number of the details of his system of thought. While Tolstoy's missionary Christianity

repelled Gordon, his influence so permeated the thought of the period, especially that of

the Russians, gentile and Jew alike, that Gordon felt it necessary both to translate the

text into Hebrew, and to write a refutation of its inherent attacks on Judaism.

It is in a note to this essay that Gordon first defined his new term, "חוויה“

(chavayah).49 This term was eventually adopted into Modern Hebrew. Gordon was seek-

ing a specialized term to describe a sort of life force, similar to Henri Bergson's elan vi-

tal. Drawing from Genesis 3:20 - – "חוה', כי היא היתה אם כל חי' “'Eve,' for she was the

mother of all that lives”, he declined a noun from the verb ח.י.ה, in the same form taken

by other nouns made out of verbs from the same group, especially the similar ה.י.ה. Ob-

serving that the vav and the yod are often exchanged in order to adjust a nuance of

meaning, he effectively created two terms. Chavayah is used in modern Hebrew in the

same general way as the English noun “experience.” But for Gordon, chavayah was the

indwelling “livingness” of the individual, the life force itself, but as it exists in each in-

dividual. We saw above that Bergman compared this to Bergson's elan vital, and there

are indeed similarities. But the difference is this: while Bergson's concept leads the indi-

philosopher known for his connections to Dostoyevsky. Soloviev was noted for his interest in Ecumenism and in Jewish Mysticism. His most influential work was on Sophia, the feminine embodiment of wisdom. It is possible Gordon and he met in the library of the Günzberg family, where, according to Bar Yosef, Gordon worked for a year, around the same time David Günzberg and Solovyev collaborated on a work about Jewish Mysticism. See also Aberbach, ch. 9.

48 Probably part of the longer essay “On the Significance of Science and Art”. 49 Selected Writings, p. 320


33

vidual to greater attention and focus on detail, Gordon's leads in the opposite direction –

to opening the self wider and wider, until it can encompass the whole of creation.

Gordon's term for the whole of creation, Havayah, is the similar declension of the

verb to be (ה.י.ה), as we have seen above, reflecting a terminology common in Chas-

sidic and Kabbalistic literature. For the Kabbalists and the Chassidic masters, Havayah

is the holy name of God, or even God himself, but for Gordon, the term refers to reality,

to the totality of existence, of Nature and all that is within it. For a reader versed in

Chassidic thought, the implication is one of total identification between Nature, or Be-

ing, and God, comparable to the statement of Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl

in the Me'or Eynayim:

What is the world? The world is God, wrapped in robes of God, so as to appear to be material. And who are we? We too are God, wrapped in robes of God, and our task is to unwrap the robes and discover that we and all the world are God.50

This is further explained by Gordon in his discussions of the relation between the in-

dividual's chavayah and the universal Havayah. The image used by Gordon is that of

the menorah, the holy oil lamp of the Desert Tabernacle. It is an image rich with Kab-

balistic overtones; the menorah, with it's repeating seven-fold symmetry, is a central

theme in Kabbalistic literature. The chavayah, Gordon says, is the light, while the

Havayah is the oil for the light. Through exposure to Nature, the individual gains access

to the eternal source of fuel, the endless Havayah.

Bergman compared this idea to Jung's individual and collective unconscious, but

Gordon's idea is more radical. Comparisons with Spinoza's idea of substance also fall

50 As quoted in Waskow, Down to Earth Judaism, p. 131. R' Menachem Nachum Twersky of Chernobyl was a student of the Magid of Mezeritch, and possibly of the Ba'al Shem Tov as well. His book, Me'or Eynayim was considered so important that some Chassidic leaders told their disciples to carry it with their tallit and tefillin.


34

short. Havayah, for Gordon, is everything, whereas the Spinozan substance is not all-in-

clusive. For Gordon, the internal chavayah is as much a part of it as the world outside

the individual. The relation between the two occurs by two methods of conception:

chavayah and hakarah.

(Hakarah - consciousness) הכרה and (Hasagah – conception) השגה

The individual conceives of the world, Gordon says, by two methods – by chavayah

and by hakarah. Chavayah, as we have seen above, is the state, or more correctly, the

action of living; it constitutes a pre-conscious, almost sponge-like absorption of experi-

ence. Hakarah, on the other hand, is a very different state. It is a conscious awareness,

thus limited by its own nature. As conscious awareness, the hakarah is the filter through

which the individual gains information from the world, both the inner world, within the

self, and the outer world, through the senses. As such, Gordon says, the hakarah essen-

tially creates the world, as far as the individual is concerned. This ability, however, is

limited by the self's consciousness of itself. The hakarah is able to conceive of things

only as far as their externalized appearance is concerned, even if it asks about their exis-

tential nature. Through this questioning the individual can reach a very deep under-

standing of reality51, but still, only from the externalities of reality. The deepest ques-

tion, however, “comes from the opaque side of the mirror,”52 from the self itself, from

the hakarah itself, that cannot itself be known, conceived, or seen.

All this leads to the fact that the “I” that is aware, to the extent to which she is aware, to the extent to which she thinks and feels, sees in the world and in life opposites and contradictions ad infinitum, and sees herself, as far as she attempts to settle the contradictions, thrown from one set of contradictions to the next, each

51 The Hebrew term for “reality,” מציאות, translates literally to “that which is found.” 52 Human and Nature, part 3: Selected Writings, p. 68


35

pair deeper and wider than the last, until she comes to the bottomless, most basic contradiction of all, that holds within it all other contradictions.53

Because the hakarah can only examine and investigate, can only ask more and more

questions, it can lead the self to dire straits, even to suicide. Because it can question it-

self only as far as it can examine itself, it can never lead the ego to true self knowledge.

This and more, for the constant questioning of the hakarah itself leads to frustration,

stress, and doubt. Relief can only be obtained through experience, chavayah.

It should be clarified here that this sort of experience is not the experience of experi-

mentation, of trial and error, but rather that of being. It may be helpful to use Abraham

Joshua Heschel's distinctions of “being” vs. “doing” here. Hakarah is, for Gordon, an

action, whereas chavayah is a state of being. Another useful metaphor is the Buddhist

meditator's goal – the thought-free state of samadhi. Once the meditator thinks a

thought, there is action, there is no longer samadhi, even if the meditator is only think-

ing “I'm here.” The state of samadhi is dependent on non-articulation. In the same way,

chavayah is also dependent on non-articulation, but it is also dependent on action, and

here Gordon differs from the Buddhists. The term chavayah, as mentioned above, is an

artificial construction of Gordon's own making. It is a noun, as close as Hebrew gets to

a gerund construction, thus maintaining a taste of the active state.

The unique element in Gordon's presentation of this concept lays in its pedagogical

implications. The self cannot gain true self-knowledge simply through further question-

ing, further investigation; thus the individual must have both time and space for experi-

ence, for chavayah. This means that instruction is limited – it can only provide informa-

tion to hakarah. Students, or individuals at the object of instruction, must have the op-

53 Ibid., p. 70


36

portunity to gain knowledge through chavayah. To put it another way, practice is as im-

portant as theory. For Gordon, this practice was work in nature, in the double sense of

the Hebrew term, עבודה (Avodah) – which means at once work and worship, labor and

service. Through work, the individual rehearses the chavayah, strengthening it and

learning to pay attention to its insights and conceptions.

(Avodah) עבודה

The Hebrew term Avodah means both labor and worship. In the Bible, it is the term

used for the sacrificial service of the priests. Gordon uses Avodah to refer to physical

work in nature and as a general term for labor, but not to refer to mechanical or industri-

al work. It is the natural state of humanity, the primary activity which humans would

do, regardless of consciousness or self-awareness. The dual nature of the Hebrew term

is central to his religious thought; labor is worship and vice versa. For Gordon this in-

troduced holiness into the day-to-dayness of work, but after his death it gave rise to his

legacy of the so-called 'religion of labor.'

Like most Jews of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Gordon shared the idea that

the Jews in Europe were parasites on “productive” society. This idea, with it roots in the

economics and philosophy of the 17th and 18th Centuries, was a base for both European

antisemitism and the Jewish search for a means of escape from it.54 Another idea central

to both Zionist and Antisemitic thought was the idealist critique of Judaism's focus on

the material, worldly mitzvot, especially those of kashrut and circumcision, seemingly at

the cost of heavenly ideals. This critique has ancient roots in the Epistles of Paul, and

thus dates back right to the initial schism between Rabbinic Judaism and Pauline Chris-

54 See Sternhell, ch. 1


37

tianity. In the 17th Century, Spinoza raised similar criticisms, in which the “material”

has a distinctly negative valence when compared with the “ideal.” In the early Emanci-

pation period, the criticism that Judaism is primarily materially focused while Christian-

ity primarily ideally focused was revived in German Protestant polemics against Ju-

daism, and in the Jewish responses to them. Rarely was there a question regarding the

inherent value judgment of the argument.

It is only in the wake of Marx that “materialism,” now devoid of its association with

Judaism, takes on a positive valence.55 In the Zionist movement of the early 20th Centu-

ry, one of the expressions of the first idea could be found in the division between the so-

cialist Chalutzim and the more traditional religious Jews who depended upon the

monies of the Chalukah. The Chalutzim, as socialists, accepted the criticism of tradi-

tional Judaism as “parasitic” and “unproductive,” and claimed for themselves the right

to represent a “materialist” solution (now in the Marxian sense) to the Jewish problem.

Thus they rejected many of the idealist (e.g. non-materialist, e.g. spiritual) elements of

Judaism as well, as “unproductive.” Central to this discourse is a utilitarian approach

that was anathema to Gordon.

In this respect, Gordon's notion of avodah differed from that of others in the period

of the 'Second Aliyah.' The ideal of kibush ha'avodah – literally “the conquest of labor,”

in which the worker conquered his or her self, that was unaccustomed to working, and

the Jewish workers conquered Palestine by their work – was certainly part of Gordon's

55 Environmental thought often takes a dim view of both materialism and empiricism. “Environmentalist groups which advocate holistic thought and non-invasive approaches to the human body as well as the natural environment typically define themselves against what they view as the overly specialized, materialist, and aggressive methodology of modern science,” writes Heise.


38

thought, as well as that of Vitkin, Katznelson, Ben Gurion, and other leaders of the Sec-

ond Aliyah. But Gordon saw work as truly holy, beyond the practical, utilitarian goals

of Zionism. This is exemplified in the apocryphal story in which Gordon, part of a crew

digging holes for a citrus grove at Rehovot, fell behind the others. The pay was piece-

work – e.g. the more holes, the more the pay, and the other workers were angry with

Gordon for working too slowly. When confronted by them, Gordon was unconcerned.

He told his fellows that the pay was irrelevant, the holes must be perfect for their own

sake.

(Sekhel Ne'elam) שכל נעלם and (Sekhel) שכל

The importance of chavayah notwithstanding, the importance of hakarah must not be

denied. Hakarah brings us vast and important understanding, and vital concepts. Scien-

tific knowledge, technics and empirical understanding all fall under its rubric. Gordon

again defines new terms to differentiate between the different kinds of thought that the

individual uses to process these two different kinds of knowledge that are obtained by

these tools. The knowledge that can be gained through hakarah, objective, empirical

knowledge, is processed in the שכל sekhel, while the knowledge that is gained through

chavayah is captured in the .sekhel ne'elam שכל נעלם The first is logical intellectual

thought, the second, something quite different.

Gordon's idea of sekhel ne'elam is complex and difficult to explain. In Human and

Nature, he dedicates the eighth chapter to an examination of chavayah and its method of

conceiving its special kind of knowledge. Here, Gordon begins with the animal soul,

e.g. the soul before it reaches consciousness. In examining this, we learn that the


39

hakarah is, in fact, disconnected from life, because it can only conceive of the external

form, and not the content. Since we can feel life itself, and since the only thing we can

be sure of, upon our intellectual examination of of the pre-conscious soul, is life itself,

there must be something else at work, and this something else is chavayah.56

In the same section, Gordon expands the explanation of the term that he gave in the

note to the essay “On the Difference Between Judaism and Christianity.” Chavayah, he

says, is to be found in between Havayah and hakarah; it is the mediator between the

two. In other words, real knowledge of Havayah, of the whole world and the fullness

thereof, of the totality of existence, requires at once both a simplification, a focus of

awareness, provided by hakarah, and an expansion of awareness, provided by

chavayah.

Conception of expansion [hitpashtut], from within which the conceiver comes to conceive, is within the infinite whole, and therefore is not consciously known or felt, rather, through the hidden channels of chavayah, it strengthens the total unity between what hakarah focuses in one point, and what Havayah expands throughout the whole world to infinity. By this, what is conceived of by hakarah is again found to be united with the infinite whole and alive within the infinite whole.57

The sekhel ne'elam, literally “hidden intellect,” then, is the channel through which

chavayah passes its knowledge back to the self. Though we might call this intuition, by

his use of a traditional Jewish term, Gordon seems to give it a different valence.

Not only does the sekhel ne'elam mediate knowledge of chavayah to the self, it also

mediates between the individual and the whole world. In another essay, “A Letter Not

Sent at the Time,” Gordon describes two states of the sekhel ne'elam – that of the indi-

56 We should note here that Gordon often shows materialistic or utilitarian thought as having grown from “animal” or “savage” roots.

57 Selected Writings, p. 95, my translation.


40

vidual and that of the whole world.58 Parenthetically, Gordon calls it “the sphere of the

unconscious.” Here, he clearly means something similar to the relationship between the

individual unconscious and collective unconscious in the work of Carl Jung.

Hasagah, the self's conception of the world, is equally dependent upon chavayah as

it is upon hakarah. An individual whose entire conception of the world is founded only

on what can be observed will necessarily be materialistic and corrupt. Hakarah is in-

deed the basis of science, technology, and much of the structure of society, but it cannot

explain everything. Chavayah, is the source of the glue that holds society together. Love

and genuine relationships provide nothing to the individual's hakarah, only to its

chavayah. Even though the vast majority of people live much of their lives as if their

conception of the world is based only upon their hakarah, with no input from their

chavayah, Gordon says, no one could live without both. But one who is aware of the

importance of chavayah, who pays attention to experience, who lives more, as Gordon

puts it, gains a stronger sense of the world and thus a stronger sense of self. The individ-

ual who finds a true balance between these two ways of knowing, of conceiving of the

world, gains a part of the Havayah, of the World-Being, or, as Gordon repeatedly calls

it, חיי עולם – Eternal Life.

(Hitpashtut) התפשטות and (Tzimtzum) צמצום

We saw above that Gordon's ethical thought is based in the choice of the individual

between a life of expansion and a life of contraction. These concepts are central to Gor-

don's psychological insights. The Hebrew term for contraction, tzimtzum, originates in

the Lurianic Kabbalah, where it is used to describe the action that God takes prior to the

58 Selected Writings, p. 203, see Shapira, p. 121-3


41

creation of the world. Since everything is God, Luria says, there is no room to create

anything. So God must first contract, in order to allow space to exist. Only after there is

space, can the world be created.

In Gordon's formulation of the individual, tzimtzum is the action of the self that is un-

willing or unable to live a life of hitpashtut, of expansion. This happens, he says, far too

often. A life of expansion demands from the individual constant awareness, so she

avoids it, reducing the span of her vision, of her conception, to the narrowest, most utili-

tarian range. The ability to move between the two states of tzimtzum and hitpashtut, sep-

arates humans from other animals:

The unique quality of the human, that differentiates us from all other animals, is the psychological - willful and conscious - free movement, as if all of the Infinite Being shrank down into the living and aware human soul. This is the point at which human relationship begins, relationship between the Infinite that is in tzimtzum, the Infinite that is in Depth, and the Infinite that is in expansion, Infinite surrounding, between the human ego and the human non-ego.59

Here we see Gordon's conception of the ego as the “Infinite that is in tzimtzum,” compa-

rable to another principle, the Lurianic “spark of holiness” within each individual.

A certain contradiction arises when seeking the kind of life Gordon promotes: in or-

der to escape the ego centered life of tzimtzum, to unite the hakarah and the chavayah,

the individual needs a dose of willpower well beyond the average. But willpower is fed

from the energy found in a life of hitpashtut. Gordon's solution is to be found in Nature:

“To renew the foundation of life ... to broaden and deepen the life of the individual into

the life of Nature until together they are united with Eternal Life.”60 The focus that most

human traditions have historically given to hakarah, to objective knowledge, he says, is

59 Selected Writings, p. 77, my translation 60 Ibid., p. 106


42

the weak link in the development of human spirituality. This is especially true of the

science and technology oriented society of urban industrialism.

The application of tzimtzum refers to two things: focus and reduction.61 On the one

hand, the individual chavayah is a tzimtzum of the universal Havayah. This Gordon

compares, following the traditional religious metaphors, to the similarities between a

drop of water and the ocean – both are water, one tiny, the other vast. On the other hand,

tzimtzum is the activity of the conscious mind as it attempts to gain knowledge of the

world through hakarah. In order to obtain more and more specialized knowledge,

hakarah excludes more and more of the world, narrowing its range of vision and aware-

ness.

The opposite of this narrowing, this tzimtzum, is hitpashtut, expansion of the aware-

ness to the widest possible range. This is less an action than a state, one that is obtained

through constant practice, through the exercise of chavayah. As the individual spends

more time working in Nature, the mind's awareness expands until it includes as much of

the world as it can. Buddhism calls this state 'big mind.' Chassidism uses an almost

identical term, in Aramaic, מוחין גדלות (mochin gadlut). The Buddhist path to this state

is that of awareness meditation, that of the Chassidic masters is a combination of medi-

tation and prayer. Gordon called for the individual to work in nature. But he is circum-

spect about defining expansion too clearly:

What then is life in the state of expansion? Does such life have a feeling? Isn't feeling a tzimtzum, – and how can tzimtzum be drawn of life in expansion? Does such a life have desire? For desire, too, is tzimtzum, the desire to obtain what is lacking – and how can desire be drawn here, in a place in which there is nothing to desire, in a place where there is everything, in which there is nothing beyond what

61 See Shapira, p. 168ff


43

is already there? Is there hakarah there? Hakarah in the same form, as it is known to humans ... this is perhaps the greatest tzimtzum. 62

In fact, when put this way, we can guess what Gordon will go on to declare in the

very next paragraph: that there is no way to describe his concept of hitpashtut – the use

of words would be impossible to describe something so far beyond words – for words

themselves are tools of hakarah and acts of tzimtzum.

Still, hitpashtut remains one of the most important concepts in Human and Nature. It

is the action of the soul as the individual opens her awareness to the wider world, to Na-

ture. In this act, Gordon says, the soul can encompass the whole world, not in the sense

of surrounding it, but in the sense of including it. The act of expansion is one that brings

the internal Infinite as close as possible to the external Infinite. Human nature, accord-

ing to Gordon, is Nature itself. The two are one and the same, and any experience or

knowledge that differentiates between them is mistaken or misleading. This seems to be

almost a midrash to the text of Exodus 25:8, “Build Me a dwelling and I will dwell

within them,” where the human self is the dwelling of God. By this understanding, then,

the purpose of human life seems to be to keep the two in the closest contact possible.

This is the meaning of Gordon's paean at the end of the second section of Human and

Nature mentioned in the introduction – the moment of redemption occurs when the indi-

vidual is able to unite inner nature and outer Nature. This is achieved by making the

conscious self as minimal as possible. It is as if the self is a membrane separating these

two natures. By strengthening the chavayah, the self becomes balanced and strength-

ened, so that the 'membrane' can become thinner and thinner, until it is permeable. Any-

thing that enlarges the self, 'thickens the membrane,' in essence it delays the redemption,

62 Selected Writings, p. 98


44

while anything that helps one to efface it, hastens the redemption. Since both inner na-

ture and outer Nature are one, anything that serves to deny their unity is a danger.

Gordon's Metaphors for Nature:

We can now move outward from the individual, from human nature, to Nature. Here,

Gordon uses a number of nature metaphors similar to those of Ecopsycholgists – Nature

is a boiling cauldron in which the human spirit is the highest bubble, Nature is the ocean

in which the human is the fish, unable to live without the water's constant pressure:

And Nature? For is this also not clear to all: That Nature, wide open Nature, exposed, 'spread before all' is to the Human just as water is to a fish and what the air is to all animal life on the face of the earth?63

For Gordon, הטבע, Nature, means something very broad – Nature is the substrate of

all animal life64, indeed all life. Schweid shows that Gordon's “Nature” means the totali-

ty of being, other than that which is man-made. He differentiates between two types of

instances in Gordon's use of the term, the one referring more to the aesthetic term, might

perhaps be better compared to the “outdoors” or “wilderness” of colloquial American

English. The other, more philosophical or scientific term, refers to the “nature” of

things, i.e. the biology of plants or animals, or the chemistry of compounds. But Gordon

refutes the differentiation between these two kinds of nature, says Schweid. Both the

aesthetic, creative conception of “nature” and the scientific, philosophical conception of

63 Human and Nature, p. 42 (my translation)64 Hebrew, both modern and pre-modern, neatly divides the kingdoms: the term is used only for חי

animal life. Plants are צומח, while minerals are דומם. Gordon explains his use of the term חיים in a note at the beginning of “On the Difference Between Christianity and Judaism” as mentioned above. Gordon used many idioms of traditional Hebrew, but his work reads as Modern Hebrew. This was intentional, as part of the nascent movement that made Hebrew the national language of the Zionist movement. See also “הדיבור העברי" in Selected Writings, p.220 or Second Edition, vol. II, p.481. See also Aberbach, ch. 9.


45

“nature” necessarily divide the human from nature, objectifying both, and interfering

with the human ability to “live” nature.65

Nature as God?

Shapira raises an important point regarding Gordon's approach: already in the Keter

Shem Tov, an early Chassidic text, it was noted that the gematria of is equal to הטבע

that of אלהי-ם. This point was used at the time to show that there should be no fear of

paganism in practice that includes some sort of “return to Nature” in early Chas-

sidism.66 By the time of the “back to the land” agrarianism of Gordon and the Chalutz-

im, this kind of apologetics may or may not have been necessary. It probably still res-

onated for many Jews, however, and Gordon, who had considered himself orthodox at

the time of his aliyah, would certainly have been sensitive to the criticism. The gematri-

al equation is made possible by the definite article, which supports the notion of a neo-

Platonic “ideal” of Nature. Schweid differentiates this, however, from Spinozan panthe-

ism. God cannot an object of knowledge to Gordon, he says, only of faith.67

Human nature and Nature as two parts of one whole

In his call to “live Nature,” Gordon is, in effect, saying that the interior “human na-

ture” and the exterior “outdoors” nature are one and the same. One is reminded of

Jung's image of the “pleroma” that is both everything and nothing and within and with-

out.68 The difference between Jungs “pleroma” and Gordon's “Nature,” however, is im-

65 Schweid, p. 98ff.66 Shapira, p.274ff Keter Shem Tov was published in 1794, 30 years after the Ba'al Shem Tov's death.

Though it was supposedly written by the Ba'al Shem Tov himself, it is thought to be highly hagiographical and apologetic. In this case, the editors were trying very hard to prove that Chassidic worship in nature was halakhically acceptable, and not necessarily pagan or pantheistic.

67 Schweid, 200268 See C.G. Jung, “Seven Sermons to the Dead” (1916)


46

portant. For Gordon, “Nature” is, it exists, while for Jung, the “pleroma” simultaneously

is and is not, thus negating the importance of Being itself. Ecopsychology has presented

two primary metaphors for the relationship between the human and nature, according to

Davis: (A) nature as home and family (siblings, Mother) and (B) nature as Self, in

which self-identifications are broadened to include the "greater-than- human" world and

Gaia.

As we saw above in the discussion of Gordon's terminology, he saw the interior hu-

man nature of the individual and the exterior, universal Nature as identical. The individ-

ual may experience hakarah as an impediment to the internalization of this fact, even

while using the critical faculty to observe and appreciate Nature, or to obtain a sufficient

level of understanding to know its possibility. Through work/service/worship, the indi-

vidual will energize the chavayah, which will lead her to a life of expansion, in which

she lives to her fullest, lives a life in Nature, lives Nature.

When there is total identification of the self with Nature, Gordon says, there is also a

sense of both right and of responsibility:

The human, especially when he frees himself from the cables of others, and the ropes of others, and the vanity of others69, when he sees himself as an individual within the whole of creation and feels the need to unite himself with all of creation, or when he joins with it in creativity – the human recognizes the whole of creation or is recognized by it as a thing of unity, recognizes himself living in one spirit with it, with all that lives, as if his self is the self of all that being, existing in all that exists and within all that exists, all the visions of nature and of life ... and in all that his own self, as parts of one whole, that he himself is living.70

This feeling of oneness with Nature, of unity with all creation, is evident in human emo-

tions, in feelings of sympathy and empathy, and especially when these are aroused from

69 The original Hebrew carries an alliterative play on words: "מכבלי בני האדם ומחבלי בני האדם (mekhevlei bnei ha'adam, umechevlei bnei ha'adam umehevlei bnei ha'adam) "ומהבלי בני האדם



47

awareness of pain and suffering in the world.71 Gordon seeks the roots of these feelings,

and of feelings of right and responsibility, and declares that they cannot be informed by

hakarah, but only by chavayah.

The language of the above quotation is filled with images of union and coupling. The

human, in Hebrew, is masculine. The “whole of creation,” feminine. It is easy to read a

very strong erotic tone into the text, and I think this is not by chance. A more direct ex-

ample of Gordon's use of the erotic metaphor for Nature can be seen in a letter written

to the members of Kibbutz Degania during his trip to the Zionist Convention in Prague

in 1920. Here, he writes of Nature as an old lover72:

From Lod to Kantara I stood most of the way, and from Port Said... to Alexandria I stood the whole way on the joint [between the cars] of the train. There I met face to face with my old lover, with that healthy young-old woman whom they call Madame Nature. I feel myself always well with her, whether she is sad and bitter, or stormy, or when her mood is good and she is laughing. And this time... on a clear day after a night's rain, she was in a very good mood indeed. She laughed as hard as she knows how, and caused me to laugh, too.73

Here, Nature is not an alienated Platonic ideal, all concept and no body, rather, Nature is

an intimate lover, a woman who knows Gordon face to face, knows his sense of humor

and shares a good laugh with him.74

71 Here we can see a strong Buddhist influence. Though he was not aware of Zen Buddhism or Vipassana Insight Meditation, Gordon's interest presages that of later generations. See note 82, below. The other leader of the Second Aliyah famous for his interest in Buddhism was David Ben Gurion. After his resignation from the Prime Ministership in the 1950s, Ben Gurion travelled to Burma where he visited the founder of that modern country, U Nu, spending 10 days in meditation.

72 In the Hebrew of the early Yishuv, ידיד connoted lover, while חבר connoted comrade or friend. In modern Hebrew, the connotations have switched.

73 p.209 also quoted in Tzur (1998), p.145 ,מכתבים ורשימות74 In his study of the founder of Chassidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov, Aberbach (ch. 7) discusses at length

the possibility that mystical experience is the fruit of sublimated longing for dead individuals, usually parents. In the case of the Besht, Aberbach points out that his mother died when he was a child, and compares this with the documented experience of 20th Century mystic Jhiddu Krishnamurti. In the case of Gordon, we can see a number of relationships that were cut off by death: his younger siblings who died in infancy, his parents, whose deaths shortly preceded his decision to make Aliyah, and his wife, Faige, whose illness and death in 1911 were a powerful blow to Gordon.


48

Metaphors for the Land of Israel

Ramon has shown that Gordon used exclusively feminine images for the Land of Is-

rael.75 Like Tolstoy and Lermontov among the Russians, Gordon describes the mother-

ing land's ability to embrace and heal. The use of feminine imagery for the Land of Is-

rael has existed throughout Jewish history, largely because of the gender assignment of

the Hebrew language. Biblical metaphors for the land include the well known “land

flowing with milk and honey,” in which the verb implies the breasts of a new ז.ב.ה

mother, from which the flow of milk is unstoppable. Milk is a fairly universal symbol

of health and purity, but one must assume that Gordon chose this particular landscape

metaphor for its added religious symbolism: the Rabbis of the Talmud compare Torah

to milk. Another metaphor is the more threatening “land that eats her inhabitants” that

Ramon compares with Biblical descriptions in which mothers eat their offspring in

times of war or famine. Coupled with this image is that of the Land's ability to vomit

out its inhabitants when they transgress God's commandments.

The Land of Israel to which Gordon arrived was a barren and sparsely settled back-

water of the Ottoman Empire. It was marginal land, from an agricultural point of view,

the border between Mediterranean maquis and true desert, its few waterways swampy

and inhospitable to human settlement. The Zionists read that barrenness as evidence of a

history of the ecological devastation:centuries of overgrazing had caused the destruction

of forests that covered much of the north and central mountain regions in Biblical times.

Whether this was to build and furnish medieval Ottoman pashas' palaces, or to warm

75 Ramon, p. 50ff.


49

them during the “little ice age” of the 14th to the 17th Centuries is irrelevant.76 Doubtless

Gordon's eye, enamored of the evergreen forests and the rich farmland of his native

Russia, saw Palestine like Mark Twain did forty years earlier:

The further we went the hotter the sun got and the more rocky and bare, repulsive and dreary the landscape became. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country. No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem.77

It comes as no surprise, then, that Gordon poignantly describes the the land as aban-

doned and wasted, in his fervent sermon to Zionist youth “The Dream and Its Interpreta-

tion:”78

In my dream I come to the Land. And the Land is abandoned, and wasted, and delivered into the hands of strangers. The devastation darkens the light of its countenance and embitters its spirit.

Leaving aside, for a moment, political difficulties with the notion that the Land of Israel

was empty and barren in 1904, we see here Gordon's desire to paint a picture of desola-

tion. From the perspective of the new immigrant, the land was indeed largely empty,

and whether or not centuries of overgrazing were responsible for the depletion of its na-

tive flora, compared to central Europe, it was certainly barren. The experience of the

century since, which has been an epoch of rapid agricultural and industrial development,

has shown that the Land of Israel was still below its ecological carrying capacity.79

Coming from the dense woods and long cultivated fields of Podolia, Gordon certainly

imagined a different possibility when he spoke of Nature.

76 For discussion of the history of tree planting in Palestine, see Elon, et. al., Part V, “Branches: Zionism and the land of Israel.” For a study of the historical relations of Jews and trees, see Oren.

77 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or A New Pilgrim's Progress (1869), as quoted in Cohen, Shaul “A Tree for a Tree” in Elon, et. al., p.212

78 In Burnce's translation, this essay is called “The Dream of the Aliyah,” and it opens the volume.79 See Tal, 2002. Regardless of their position on the roots of the condition in the early 1900s, most

scholars agree that the current population of 10 to 13 million exceeds the carrying capacity of the land.


50

In one of his first published letters, written to his friend Boris Brutskus and later pub-

lished in the Russian Jewish newspaper Evreyskaia Zhizn,80 Gordon wrote realistically

about his difficulty in adjusting to the harsh landscape of the Middle East. The bright

sunshine was apparently hard to take: “I'm not used to such a perspective, because of

the clarity of the air everything seems to have an intense clarity, even from afar, that

stabs the unready eye, so that the beauty seems not natural, but artificial. I'm not used to

such monotony...” In the landscape of Israel, Gordon feels like a guest, afraid to be too

easy or comfortable, quite the opposite of his feeling about Russia. “The landscape of

Russia not only understands you, but you understand it...” Russia is simple, whereas the

Land of Israel, while loving and caring, is not. Not only is the landscape different and

hard to get used to, but also the people:

The local people [Palestinian fellahin, apparantly] have not risen to the [spiritual] level of Nature in the Land of Israel. The farmers here don't share the healthy, jolly faces [as their Russian counterparts]. The farmers' children, especially, are generally weak and too quiet for the demands of their age (only occasionally do you meet a child with a fresh face, and even less one who is genuinely mischievous) – all this raises melancholy thoughts... On the other hand, at the edges of the Hebrew Settlements new plantings are added every year, and the soil gets more and more cultivated, thus the climate improves, life becomes easier, and human life gets healthier and fresher.81

We can see here that Gordon's initial reaction to the Land of Israel was one of dis-

comfort. His letter clearly betrays a Euro-centric view of nature and agriculture, and of

80 Second Edition, II:p. 77-86 (See Ramon, “Political Repercussions”) Gordon's critique of the movement's leadership and its disconnection from the land is evident in his comparison of Zionism to both the Balkan and Irish national movements, neither of which was detached from its native land. Unlike them, for the Zionist movement, “everything must be imported: the ideals, the movement, the people, the activists, the means and the priorities, in other words – all the facts of life. The Land – the soil – appears for this movement to be only an appendage. This is abnormal and bound to lead to sad results. ... All the time that we will not discover the natural source of our national life from within the national soil, our movement will be artificial, like a potted plant growing in the shade... Our only thought is to live a national life of work in peace. (I emphasize the words 'work in peace' so that I will not be misconstrued. Indeed, everything I will ever say about liberty, rebirth, etc., my meaning is only to serene internal work, national work).” [emphasis in original] 81 Ibid.


51

the “natural health” of the Russian peasants, but it seeks solutions on the level of the in-

dividual – not only on the level of the whole people. In his study of the place of Eretz

Yisrael in the Zionist Experience, Schweid points out that though Zionist literature had

great “power to awaken the desire to make Aliyah ... in the first meeting with the

Promised Land it was exposed in all its weakness: it created an illusion instead of

preparing the Oleh for the difficulty awaiting, that of coping with the landscape [and]

the climate...” 82

This text, the first of a series of three public “letters to the exile,” while intending to

serve the ideological cause, shows a great deal more honesty than what might be expect-

ed from propaganda. Upon his own arrival in Yaffo, Gordon was aware that many

young Jews, simultaneously driven by the fear of pogroms and pulled by the mythic call

of the Zionist movement, were unable to adjust. While Gordon continued to use the

term “Nature” throughout his work, he ceased to describe the details of the landscape

around him. Nature had to become an ideal for him, in order to serve his ideological

purpose. This may leave us to wonder at his great love for something left undescribed.

Tzur sees Gordon's refusal to write lyrical descriptions of the natural beauty of Eretz

Yisrael as a rejection of Romanticism:

He claims that Nature as exposed in the perspective of the Artist or the ecstasy of the mystic as nothing but expressions of distance. Nature exposed hides in its details, details of cruelty, of constant and total war that occurs in it, the hidden Nature for which Gordon so thirsted: Nature that will unite the feeling of existence, the cycle of life, the ability to withstand catastrophe and pain, and the desire for renewal.83

82 Schweid 200483 Tzur, 1998, p. 128, emphasis in original.


52

This is the explanation for Gordon's focus on human nature, says Tzur, and his lack

of descriptive detail. Where he does focus on the details of the landscape, it is only to

emphasize his unwillingness to deify Nature.

The hallmark of Gordon's project becomes, by this reading, a sensitivity to the uni-

versal nature of the difficulties of adjustment to the environment suffered by the new

immigrant Jewish workers were having in Eretz Yisrael. On the one hand, they were re-

turning to their “mother,” to the moledet, literally the “birthland.” On the other hand,

they were coming to an alien place, not to the landscape of their own childhood, that

might be romantically aroused by poetic description. As much as Gordon can be called

a leader, it was by virtue of his example and his honesty in the face of this struggle.84 He

was neither a psychologist, nor a doctor, but, primarily, an educator and a publicist. By

focusing on the human side of the equation, he succeeded in describing the process of

redemption as healing nonetheless. Schweid points out that Gordon's ability to weather

the difficulty of reconciling the harsh reality of life in Eretz Yisrael, on the edge of the

desert, with the idealized myth of the homeland, was in his ability to interpret it through

his universal understanding of Nature. By propounding a philosophy of Nature, one that

could help emigrants overcome their pain, and by his personal example of its implemen-

tation, Gordon earned his stature as a modern day prophet.

Duality as the root of suffering both for Nature and for the Human

Davis writes that “The illusion of a separation of humans and nature leads to suffer-

ing both for the environment (as ecological devastation) and for humans (as grief, de-

84 Ramon calls his leadership “liminal” because of his reluctance to take positions of honor or to make speeches at the many political conventions of the time.


53

spair, and alienation).” As noted above, Gordon's thought shared with other “back-to-

the-land” nationalisms the image of the homeland as mother and as such, as responsible

for the initial education of the people. Gordon's unique contribution, Ramon says, is his

triangular definition of the organic relationship between the landscape, the language,

and the people of Israel.85

The axiom that guided Gordon seems to be that all peoples bear the imprint of the

landscape in which they developed. For the people of Israel, that is the Land of Israel.

Only in that unique landscape could Jewish monotheism have developed, says Gordon,

echoing many thinkers before him, Jewish and Christian alike.86 The experience of exile

from the Land is also one of exile from the comfort of the mother, and a return to the

Land must, ideally, be experienced as a return to the bosom of the mother. The returning

people are able to heal not only themselves, but also to heal the Land, their mother. Gor-

don repeats this image of healing the land by working it and returning it to its fruitful

nature in most of his work, especially in his letters to the diaspora. The comparison of

this work, as that of “a mature son returning to his mother to help with the house work”

clarifies for us Gordon's position – a mature, adult child will see work (in Nature, on the

Land) as his responsibility to his mother.87 Gordon continues “This work... will develop

the feeling of labor and creativity in him to the highest extent, the taste for nature and

for life, the awareness of his highest responsibility to all life and creativity, and above

85 Ibid., p. 6086 This is obviously reminiscent of Krochmal's neo-Hegelian reading of Jewish History, also shared by

Graetz and Dubnow.87 See Ramon


54

all – awareness of the value of his highest inner self as the highest expression of life and

Being.”88

Traditional Jewish Concepts of Dualism

Gordon's mysticism and his political activity in the Zionist movement complement

each other from both sides: the mystic view of the Land of Israel, and the mystic view

of the goal of the mitzvot, of individual action. While the “idea of mystical union with

God or with a higher being is universal in theological systems,”89 it was not the primary

goal of Jewish mysticism by the 19th Century. Throughout the early modern period, if

not before, the focus of Jewish mysticism moved from the individual's personal mystical

experience to a more theurgic striving for the redemption of all of Israel. Historical

events, beginning with the Spanish expulsion, drove waves of messianism that peaked

with the Sabbatean movement in the mid-17th Century. This movement's demise,

following Shabbetai Zvi's adoption of Islam in 1670, plunged the bruised and broken

Jewish people to the edge of despair. The main Rabbinic response to this was a focus on

study and repentance. But in Eastern Europe, where the despair was perhaps greatest,

grew an attempt to salvage the self-esteem of the Jewish people – the Chassidic

movement, which called for a change of focus of Jewish activity from study to prayer,

and from sorrow and mourning to joy. In Chassidism, individual spiritual experience

had importance, but its goal remained the redemption of all Israel.

The Chassidic and Kabbalistic traditions in Judaism recognize a kind of dualism in

the fallen state of the world. Kabbalistic Kavvanot, intention-focusing statements made

88 Selected Writings, p. 25589 Aberbach, p. 101


55

before performing the various mitzvot, contain the Aramaic formula “in order to unite

the Holy One, Blessed Be He, with his Shekhinah ... to unite the holy name of Yod –

Heh with [that of] Vav – Heh in perfect unity, I hereby [perform the stated mitzvah].” In

this formula, we can see the goal of unification as the goal of each and every mitzvah.

Since the mitzvot include most daily actions, the message of this practice is that the indi-

vidual, through aware action, can affect the maintenance of the Holy Unity. By the ad-

dition of the kavvanah, the individual Jew is an actor in the Cosmos. Thus the individual

can take positive action, and not only worry about possible negative actions, e.g. sin.

The Ashkenazic tradition, following the dictum that Kabbalah should only be studied

by family men over 40 who are well versed in Torah, usually limited the knowledge of

these Kavvanot to the learned. A major innovation of Chassidism was the adoption of

the Siddur of Rabbi Isaac Luria, the 16th Century Kabbalist. This Siddur, known as

Nusach Sefarad, that adapted many customs from the Siddurim of North African Jews,

among them these Kavvanot.90

The advent of print and paper technology aided in the dispersion of information and

of literacy.91 This is often recognized in the study of the spread of Jewish texts, especial-

90 Most of my knowledge of Chassidism and mysticism is based on private study with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, shlit”a, (whose training began in the Chabad school of Chassidism in the 1940s and 50s) between the years of 1987-9 in Philadelphia, and with Dr. Yossele Bar Tziyon (Algerian born founder and former longtime member of Kibbutz Re'im, emeritus of Ben Gurion University) in 2002-4 at Kibbutz Lotan. The concepts I am calling Chassidic here belong to the teachings of the Maggid of Mezeritch, as passed down through Chabad. See also Scholem, and ch. 6 and 7 of Aberbach. While others have criticized Scholem's focus on the corporate conception of the Jewish people as tainted by his own Zionism, I am not questioning it here, as I believe it to have been shared by Gordon.

91 Another historical trend should also be noted in this discussion – an ecological one. The messianic wave that swept Europe in the 17th Century was not confined to the Jews – Christian Millenarianism also reached a peak around this time. This may have been connected with changes in the climate. The so-called “little ice age” that had caused much hardship in Europe over the previous 300 years was drawing to an end, and the population of the continent had finally recovered to the level prior to the Black Death of the mid-14th Century. The increase in prosperity brought with it an increase in


56

ly the Shulchan Arukh, the quintessential code of Jewish law, but it must also have had

an effect on the spread of the Siddur, allowing whole communities to adopt the Lurianic

Nusach Sefarad together. By the end of the 19th Century, Chassidic and Kabbalistic

practice had spread the notion that God could be considered as having an external as-

pect, the Creator, the Holy One, and an internal aspect, the indwelling Shekhinah.92

In the first lecture in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem

briefly discusses dualism in Jewish mysticism. “Every cognition of God is based on a

form of relation between Him and His creature,” he writes, noting further that “the in-

herent contradiction between the two aspects of God is not always brought out ... clear-

ly” in order not to offend the philosophers. Finally, he points out that any doctrine of

“genuine” dualism would be considered “downright heretical.”93 Nevertheless, the tradi-

tions of Jewish mysticism developed elaborate systems to explain God's presence in the

world. One of these is the Zoharic Kabbalah, with its emphasis on a gendered split that

can be healed through the performance of the mitzvot. In its Chassidic interpretation,

this sees the purpose of Jewish life to repair the world. The Shekhinah has been in exile

from the Holy One since the exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel, and is likened to

a wife forced to live apart from her husband. Only performance of mitzvot with the

proper intention can free her. In the words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, “all my trav-

els are travels to the Land of Israel,” that is to say, even the most mundane act leads to

fertility, while changes in hygiene and diet also improved life expectancy.92 The gender valences traditionally given to these aspects is beyond the scope of this study. For

discussion of gender and theology as it affected Gordon, see Ramon.93 Scholem, p. 11-14


57

the ultimate goal, not the physical arrival of the Jew in the Land of Israel, but the unifi-

cation of the sundered lovers, the Holy One and His exiled Shekhinah.

Jewish mystical traditions also maintain that the individual, the self, is the nexus of

several parts. Already in the Biblical text, we see יצר לב האדם רע מנעוריו (“the drive in

the heart of the human is evil from youth” - Genesis 8:21). In the Talmud, there is

extensive discussion of this evil drive, yetzer hara. It is usually connected to the sexual

drive, and it is clear that the world cannot exist without it. Sometimes, it appears

together with a drive for good, yetzer hatov. These two drives are sometimes portrayed

as two angels that guide the individual. While the yetzer hara is often connected to the

physical drives of the body, the individual's will is always a further discrete entity, able

to overcome the yetzer. The self is also understood to include the soul, for which

Hebrew has three words: ,(ruach) רוח Chassidic .(neshamah) נשמה and ,(nefesh) נפש

thought even divides the soul further, adding two more elements: ,(chayah) חיה and

the last of which never loses its connection with the soul of God. But ,(yechidah) יחידה

even in mystical Jewish thought, the self exists at the nexus of these various parts,

discrete and maintaining free will. It can choose to heed mind, body, yetzer, soul, or not.

The radical element in the Chassidic/Kabbalistic conception of mitzvah is the

importance it places on the actions of the individual – the redemption of Israel is not

only dependent on the will of God, nor only on the corporate actions of the People of

Israel, now the individual Jew can also take part in the redemption. Though the

individual may act, the goal is not individual redemption, as in Buddhism, it is the

corporate redemption of the People of Israel, of the entire nation. As much as he was


58

entranced by Buddhism, Gordon finally rejected it because of its denial of individual

will and action.

In the traditional Jewish conception, not only do the Jews mourn their exile from

Zion, but the Land itself mourns the Jews' absence, an image Gordon repeats in “The

Dream” and elsewhere. Clearly, this is not the same as the ecopsychologist's view, in

which all Nature mourns the devastation, but it is similar. The primary difference is that

of scale – while the ecopsychologists' view encompasses all of Nature, Gordon's reaches

only the smaller scale of the national homeland. Another distinction is that in the uni-

versal devastation of Nature in the ecopsychologists' cosmology, all are responsible, in

Gordon's Zionism, there is an elision. Did Gordon feel that the traditional lament of “be-

cause of our sins we were exiled from our land and it was laid bare” put an almost un-

bearable burden of guilt on his young contemporaries? Did his experience of a life

threatening attack in 1909 change his mind about the responsibility of the local Arabs

for the devastated land he found? Perhaps these thoughts also led Gordon's writing to

the lessened focus on specific landscape images, turning to generalized, universalized

pictures of Nature.

Primitivism and the Roots of Religion

Deep Ecologists view the collective sin of technology (for some it is agriculture, for

the most extreme it is symbolic thinking)94 similarly to the traditional Jewish lament

94 See Eisenberg and especially Roszak, who, like Gordon, seeks a balance between critique and embrace of urban industrial society and a rapprochement between nature and culture. Primitivism, a branch of Anarchist thought, is a radical rejection of urban industrial society, extreme to the point of supporting terrorism. To better understand the primitivist critique of civilization, see the ironically prolix writings of Jon Zerzan at http://www.awok.org, http://www.primitivism.org, and http://johnzerzan.net. For someone who propounds the overthrow of symbolic thought, he sure knows how to make use of it.

http://www.awok.org/

http://johnzerzan.net/



http://www.primitivism.org/






59

“because of our sins we were exiled from our land.” For Gordon, on the personal level

the solution was to leave his office, take up the hoe, and “Live Nature” - e.g. to live as

close as possible to the land, working outdoors as much as possible, doing work that

“increases life,” like farming. On the public level, he joined the ranks of Zionist publi-

cists – a role with which he was never entirely comfortable.

In that writing, Gordon takes a strong stand against primitivism. He honestly believes

that it is possible to bridge the gap between human nature and Nature in the world with-

out “breaking the vessels,” to use the kabbalistic term, without losing the advantages

gained by technology, as long as it does not reduce the contact of the individual with

Nature. He shares a strong critique of urbanism with the anarchists and the primitivists,

and this may be what makes him seem to be a Romantic.

The alienation of the Jews from the holy Land is only the most extreme case of the

rupture between Human and Nature. This rupture, this pain, has at its heart a dualism of

Human and Nature, an awareness that there was once a time when the human soul was

part of Nature, without self-awareness, and the desire to return to that state. This, Gor-

don says, is the root of the drive that gave birth to religion. Religion began as a primi-

tive attempt to regain the state of unity. Since religion is a striving for unity, its highest

form must be that of monotheism, of Judaism.95 In Russia, Gordon was an orthodox

Jew, indeed, in his early publications, he himself uses this term. But he was aware that

Judaism would have to go through some changes to adjust to the reality of Zionism, of

life in Eretz Yisrael. Re-rooted in it's natural soil, its practitioners fluent in its language,

95 Having already noticed his polemic with Tolstoy, we can expect that Gordon will dwell on this sort of Jewish apologetics at every opportunity.


60

it would become an organic spiritual practice. It would become a tool to reconnect the

spiritual and the material, when the Jewish people makes its home in the Eretz Yisrael.

Gordon explains his nationalism from this spiritual point of view. Following the his-

torical progression of human society from small groups to tribes to nations, he notices

that as disparate groups unite into nations, their national religious life unites around

fewer and fewer gods, ending with a pair or one individual god. Seeking unity for the

individual soul, he says, leads the individual into community. “For the highest unity be-

tween a human and herself, between an individual and his fellow, between two nations

... and also between the Human and Nature with all that lives and exists within it, withal

religion only attains the highest responsibility when it attains a unique and absolutely

unified God... Only in this way can religion achieve the level of ideals such as 'Love

your neighbor as yourself' etc.”96 Religion is driven by the individual's desire to unify

hakarah and chavayah. Gordon's expected apologetics says this may best be done

through a religion (today we might say a spirituality) that focuses on God's unity.

Gordon struggled with the religious obligations of Judaism during his life in Eretz

Yisrael. Around the time of his arrival, he became a vegetarian. He chose a life of labor,

in the company of the mostly secular chalutzim, rather than finding a place in the reli-

giously observant towns. His roommate in Rehovot challenged his use of tefillin, as they

are made of leather, and he stopped using them at some point before his wife and

daughter came to Israel. Nevertheless, he continued the practice of daily prayer into the

time he lived at Ein Ganim, using only his tallit. By the end of his life, the only practice

he maintained in its traditional form was the fast on Yom Kippur. This, he said, was



61

more to connect himself to the greater Jewish people, than to expiate any personal sins:

“The individual can conduct an accounting of his or her soul every day, or on whatever

day it seems fitting to do so,” Gordon wrote shortly before his death. “But here, as in all

national endeavors... what is important is the energy that the individual strengthens by

adding to it; the light that is poured upon her from the fount of Life of the highest per-

sonality; what is important is the noble melody, further ennobled by the individual's

voice as it blends in the sea of voices of the highest human-cosmic chorus.”97

Religion and Secularism

The secularization of the chalutzim troubled Gordon. He argued with calls for a com-

plete overthrow of religion in the life of Jews in the Yishuv. He was more aware than his

younger contemporaries of their emotional need to retain their connections with the

past. Ramon relates the tale of a Passover Seder during World War I, at which Gordon

presided. When it came time to recite the “Maggid,” Gordon sensed the despair in the

room, and moved quickly to the meal, returning to the midrash only gradually, and con-

necting the tale of the Exodus to the experiences of the chalutzim, their suffering and

longing. “Gordon's principle of applying traditional ritual to modern secular reality was

thus intuitive and emotional,” Ramon writes.98

Like Berdyczewski, Brenner, and other militant secularists, Gordon recognized the

need to reevaluate the place of religious ritual in Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael, but his

97 Ibid., p. 408 Prophetically, perhaps, Gordon repeated in this essay that a religion, or better, a spiritual practice, that is entirely without faith, is available in Buddhism. This is perhaps a premonition of the popularity of Buddhism in the secular West today, and especially among Jews in Israel and elsewhere. Unlike Christianity, which requires a declaration of faith, Buddhism offers a practice that is entirely centered on the individual, with no God, native or alien. It also requires no renunciation of membership in the Jewish people.

98 Ramon, p. 259


62

recognition of its emotional purpose sets him apart from them. The whole project of

Human and Nature can be seen as an attempt to expound a Jewish spirituality in lan-

guage acceptable to the secular leaning chalutzim. “Religion did not lose [its primacy in

human life] because the eyes of humanity were opened to the blindness of the infinite...

rather because the eyes of humanity never saw that human nature itself was losing the

sight of its more important side, from the side on which it is bound to the source of life,

to the world of Nature.”99 The whole secular-philosophical project, Gordon says here,

exercises the hakarah to the point of blinding the chavayah to the truth of human exis-

tence. The “boredom” of the cultured human is the result of this blindness. “From this –

false relationships, false emotions, all falsity; from this – social etiquette and socially

accepted lies; from this – the duality of the human soul and life.”100 The search for unity,

both in human nature and in Nature, is the central spiritual task.

Unifying Two World Views: Gordon's Human Nature as Jewish Mysticism

Whatever gender valence we give to the sundered elements, internal and external, of

God, we can see some similarity to Gordon's concepts of Havayah and chavayah.

Following the concept of “as above, so below” we can compare the internal aspect to

the individual chavayah, while the external aspect can be seen as the universal

Havayah.101 The unification of these was, as we have already seen, the ultimate goal of

human life, as far as Gordon was concerned.

99 Selected Writings, p. 137100Ibid., p. 137101Gordon's Nature sometimes carries a gender valence informed by the masculine gender given the term

”הטבע“ in Hebrew. We have seen that Shapira shows the Chassidic gematria that equates ”הטבע“ with אלהים, God the Creator, with which Gordon was presumably familiar. So it may be that Gordon viewed the grand external concept of Nature as masculine, and perhaps also the indwelling nature of the individual.


63

Gordon was sensitive to the changing place of the individual within the community,

as the world moved on the continuum from religious to secular, he nevertheless

maintained an insistence on the corporate nature of human existence: the closing words

of Human and Nature emphasize this above all: “The way to the Highest Life lies,

therefore, ... in an aspiration to live ... more, to drown the individual self in life, in the

life of all that lives and exists, in the Life of the World. ... Human life begins with the

Nation, and the life of the Nation begins with Nature.”102

He recognized that he would be accused of mysticism early on in his work on

Human and Nature. His response comes early on in the essay, in the section published

in his lifetime. The intellectual atmosphere of Palestine at the time certainly favored

hard-headed materialism or “scientific” rationalism over any form of mysticism, and

this presumably is what led Gordon to preempt any such attack. “The charge is –

mysticism. ... But how can we apply the term mysticism to that which is the very

essence of man – the very self of the individual, the personal will, the individual

character, the “I” that lies in the field of the unknown and unsensed, and decidedly not

in the realm of hakarah?”103 This seeming rebuttal is, in fact merely the opening of a

counter-attack on secular rationalism. The more advanced human development, Gordon

says, the larger our store of scientific knowledge becomes, the greater is our need to

“live in Nature.”104 I read this as a justification: a definition of the human need for a

102Selected Writings, p. 171103Selected Writings, p. 51, translated in Burnce, p. 174104See quote on p. 1. There is a marked defensiveness in the tone of Gordon's apology for his nature-

based mysticism, a defensiveness that runs through much of the scholarship of Jewish Studies, especially in Israel. Amir (2004) writes “Gordon is indubitably a rationalist.” If it is indubitable, why is there a need to say so? If there is doubt, it must be dispelled through argument.

It seems to me that there is a strong sense of suspicion in Israel against anything that can be labeled as “spiritual” or “romantic.” Spirituality and mysticism, since they are anti-scientific, are


64

mystical dimension, one that is unknowable through any scientific or technological

extension of the senses. This is the language of what Aldous Huxley called “the

perennial philosophy,” the same discourse that will be raised in the late 20 th Century as

transpersonal psychology, and, when related to Nature, as ecopsychology. 105

Prescriptions and practice: Can the alienated soul be healed?

“Realizing the connection between humans and nature is healing for both. This reconnection includes the healing potential of contact with nature, work on grief and despair about environmental destruction, ecotherapy, psychoemotional bonding with the world as a source of environmental action, and sustainable lifestyles.”106

We have seen that Gordon's conception of work, following the identity of the He-

brew terms, can be seen as a form of worship. This was drawn out by the secular Labor

Zionists into a “religion of labor.” These secular nationalists gladly adopted a theory

and a practice that would lead young people to a life of agricultural labor that could set-

tle and “redeem” the land, and thereby build the nation, economically and physically.

There is no doubt that this was one of Gordon's primary goals. But by removing the ulti-

mate goal, which for Gordon was to partake of Infinite Life, the Labor Zionists lost an

suspect as being therefore childish and somehow immoral. They were often blamed for the suffering of Jews at the hands of anti-semites (see below). This was more the case in the early 20 th Century than it is today. Romanticism, on the other hand, was thoroughly discredited in the late 20th Century because of its connections with Nazism, and is only beginning to be rehabilitated in scholarship today. In Israel, such a rehabilitation will necessarily take longer than other places.

105“Ecopsychology is based on the recognition of a fundamental nonduality between humans and nature and on the insight that the failure to experience and act from this nonduality creates suffering...” Davis 1998 Roszak (2001) quotes Huxley's 1962 utopian novel Island: “Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is in relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. ... always teach the science of relationship in conjunction with the ethics of relationship.” An opposing view of ecological mysticism is presented by Bookchin: “Identifying the natural world as 'wilderness' or as a transcendental 'cosmos' ... does more than cloak dire social imperatives with a mystical pseudo-reality. It actually intensifies our alienation from the natural world, despite the fact that many deep ecology acolytes regard this very alienation as the source of our social problems.” (Bookchin “Which Way”, p. 16, as quoted in Humphrey) Gordon's project, like Ecopsychology, seeks to solve this very alienation.

106Davis, Op cit.


65

important aspect of Gordon's thought. Unlike his students and his ideological grandchil-

dren in the youth movements, Gordon was primarily a religious man. Though he even-

tually gave up traditional Jewish practice, he was able to maintain a religiosity through a

new understanding of the mitzvot of the land of Israel, a new understanding of avodah.

The obligation that had been fulfilled through “worship” was now fulfilled through

work in Nature.107

Unification of the Self and Nature

What are the implications of Gordon's construction of human nature for Nature, for a

human place in the world? Was Gordon's a universal call to live a life of expansion? I

believe it was. I believe that Gordon's hope was a messianic one, in which the wave that

began with the individual, through the family would extend to the entire Zionist com-

munity, then the entire Jewish people, and thus ever outwards to the whole world. His

vision of individual responsibility driven by identification with, and not just empathy

for, the other, extended past humans, past animals, past the vegetable kingdom. Without

ever seeing the pictures of the planet from space that have so energized the modern en-

vironmental movement, Gordon saw the human self as able to encompass the entire

earth, and saw no reason that the individual might not aspire to do so every day.

Of Ecopsychology, Davis writes that “At their deepest, psyche and nature emerge as

expressions of the same whole and reveal these questions and insights as essentially

spiritual... Both nature and psyche flow as expressions of the same absolute source. This

107Schweid, above, also makes this conclusion.


66

is not simple a reciprocity between humans and nature, nor merely a broadening of the

self to include the natural world, though it includes both. Rather, it calls for develop-

ment beyond the self (self-transcendence) to an identification with the spirit or mystery

which gives rise to all manifestations--human, nature, and otherwise.” Gordon would

certainly agree.

Analysis and Critique: Gordon's Nature as a Romantic Return to Eden

Is Gordon's call for the reintegration of alienated Jew into nature in the Land of Israel

equivalent to the call of the Ecopsychologists for the reintegration of the alienated hu-

man into the natural world? Ramon comments that Gordon's “conception of the Land

echoed an ideological move from a national reversal of hierarchy to an overall critique

of domination of Nature and of the psychological desire for domination and hierarchy.”

This move, however, proved to be well before its time.108

Gordon's thought was vital to the Zionist enterprise for another reason: he provided a

universal rationale for work on the land. Valorization of agriculture was considered a

necessary step in the settlement of Eretz Yisrael. Agricultural labor was shown by Gor-

don and others as a method for 'normalizing' the Jewish people through the 'conquest of

labor.' Young people were urged to seek a 'life of creativity' in agriculture, a movement

in the opposite direction than other forces might drive them.109

108Ramon, p. 60. The muddled state of Israeli society in 2007 is, perhaps, the bastard child of such contradictory ideologies. The country has spent more than half its history dominating the Palestinian population (and all its history dominating its Arab minority), using brutal means, all the while claiming to be the victim of Arab aggression. The environmental movement in Israel has whole heartedly adopted a Gordonesque anti-domination rhetoric, and is typified by activism aimed at environmental justice.

109The motivations for this included the Ottoman law that granted land rights to those who work their land, a law that became part of Israeli property law.


67

Gordon's call to a “life of expansion” seems filled with romantic rhetoric. We have

noted that he was influential as much by virtue of his personal example, by his dedica-

tion to a life of labor, if not more than he was by virtue of his writing. He approached

the state of the Jews as an 'ailment' and presented what he believed to be a 'cure'. This

cure, on the surface, was rife with dreamy, romantic back-to-the-land naturalism, espe-

cially in his publicistic writing. Nevertheless, the details were less important than the

spirit, and this is why Gordon reads as a passionate romantic, in the mold of 19th centu-

ry lovers of nature like Tolstoy, Emerson, and Walt Whitman, all of whom he admired.

But at its core is sound pedagogical wisdom, borne of his keen observation of both his

own personal process and that of the young people around him.

Gordon claims to be calling for a life in Nature that can encompass progress and

technological advance, a claim contradicted by moments of primitivist essentialism. Of-

ten, while claiming an embrace of progress, he is calling for a return to a primal, pure,

natural state. Like so many of his contemporaries, the rational basis of Gordon's thesis

grows from a supposedly scientific study of history: “The people has been completely

cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls these two thousand years.”110 Give

or take a few hundred: Gordon is more interested in the emotional and spiritual discon-

nect from the “natural” condition of humanity than in historical accuracy. His claim is

that by their nature, nations or peoples work their own land, but for hundreds of years,

the Jewish people suffered from a disconnection from their land. As a result, Jews were

unable to develop a healthy culture. This is an essentializing, neo-Hegelian reading of

history – not serving objective, scientific accuracy, but messianic teleology: Eastern Eu-

.in Second Edition, I:134ff "העבודה"110


68

ropean Jews of the time are city dwellers, they have no national culture, their language

is not a 'natural' one, etc.; when they return to a natural life on their own land, all their

troubles will be solved.

Gordon freely adds a leavening of a popular socialism in his publicistic writing: “We

lack the principle ingredient for national life. We lack the habit of labor ... to which one

is attached in a natural and organic way.”111 The solution to an unnatural culture is a nat-

ural and organic connection to labor. A life of the mind requires a life of the body, and

the body can only truly work in its own space, its own land. This can only happen for

the Jews in Eretz Yisrael. In the Holy Land, the metaphors of the Holy Tongue will fi-

nally come to life. This is simply a recapitulation of the mystical nationalism of Yehuda

HaLevy that we examined earlier, in the supposedly rational language of Hegel and

Marx.

Isaiah Berlin defines two hallmarks of Romanticism: firstly, a focus on human will

as a measure of worth. Any and every action can be seen as a work of art, measured by

the extent to which its actor succeeds in expressing his own will in its doing. Thus, Gor-

don's public identity, as a man who 'practiced what he preached,' is another romantic

statement. In a sense this was Gordon's critique of 'cultural Zionism' - “What we are

come to create at present is not the culture of the academy, before we have anything

else...” because first “we must do with our own hands all the things that make up the

sum total of life.” There can be no cream if there is no milk, as it were, so even bookish,

middle-aged managers like Gordon must put a shoulder to the wheel. Leaders must lead

111Ibid. See p. 28 above, the text related to footnote 49. In Human and Nature, Gordon rejected socialism as overly utilitarian and goal oriented.


69

by example. Describing Gordon's relationship with his younger co-workers, Muki Tzur

writes:

If there was anyone who was able to enwrap the young chalutzim, to protect them and to extend a fatherly hand in a world without parents, it was Gordon: He symbolized both continuity without betrayal and compromise without conceding personal revolution.112

The impossibility of such “continuity without betrayal, compromise without conces-

sion” seems typical of this romantic ideal. Gordon himself wrote in another essay, “It

must be absolutely clear to us that we have two paths to choose from in Palestine: one is

the practical way of the worldly-wise, the other is the real life of national rebirth.”113

This is an ideology for the redemption of the Jewish People through Labor, rather than

through some traditional religious process. The reality of this 'Real Life' is purely sub-

jective, and its 'vitality', defined only tautologically. Gordon's redemption seems to be a

self-authenticating process, rather than one with a clearly defined, measurable scale.

The second of Berlin's hallmarks of Romanticism is the focus on flow, rather than on

content. Gordon's imagery of Life and Nature surely fit this pattern well. The romantic

individual stands alone in the chaos of the universe:

“... there is no structure of things. There is no pattern ... There is only, if not the flow, the endless self-creativity of the universe. The universe must not be conceived of as a set of facts ... the universe is a process of ... perpetual self-creation ... by identifying with it ... by discovering in yourself those very creative forces which you also discover outside, by identifying on the one hand spirit, on the other hand matter, by seeing the whole thing as a vast self organising and self-creative process, you will at last be free.”114

112Tzur, p 80113“Some Observations”, Herzberg, p375114Berlin, Sir Isaiah, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) p120 I am

well aware that I am eliding Berlin's reference to the 'dark side' of romanticism: “which can be conceived ... as hostile to man, as by Schopenhauer or even to some extent by Nietzsche, so that it will overthrow all human efforts to check it, to organise it, to feel at home in it, to make oneself some kind of cosy patter in which one can rest...”


70

Berlin staked his claim on the roots of Romanticism in a rebellion against 18th Centu-

ry empiricism. Shapira, however, has shown that Gordon's eschatology grows fairly or-

ganically from traditional Judaism, leaving us to wonder why Berlin elides the link be-

tween Romanticism and traditional religious thought.115 That link is part of the chain

that includes Roszak's Ecopsychology.

In his vast book The Ecology of Eden, Evan Eisenberg examines in great detail the

timeless myths of Eden and Arcadia in space, and the Golden Age and World to Come

in time. He shows how the dream of a perfect world, in which the relationship between

nature and culture is balanced and perfected, is an image that has been held up as a hope

for human destiny, whether attainable or not, since the time of the Sumerians and be-

fore. When seen through the scope of Eisenberg's study, Gordon's dream fits neatly into

the wave of neo-romantic back-to-the-land nationalism that swept much of Europe in

the late 19th and early 20th Century. Gordon might be relegated, in a sense, to a cul-de-

sac of nationalist naturalist philosophy, like Tolstoy for the Russians, and Thoreau for

the Americans.

Beyond Romanticism: Zionism as Jewish bio-regionalism

Jeremy Benstein notes that the influence of philosophical rationalism on modern

Jewish thought has often blinded us to the fact that “Jews from the Bible onward have

115Particularly his own, e.g. Jewish, tradition. In the Talmudic discussion of the messianic age (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 93b), for example, the sage Rav says “all the dates [mentioned by the prophets] have passed, it [the coming of the messiah] depends only on repentance and good deeds.” This is understood to mean that actions are more important than declarations of faith, thus work on the farm is more important than philosophy on the page. Gordon himself calls into question the Romantic tendency to favor form over content. In his chapter on aesthetics, he says that a concept of beauty in tzimtzum favors form over content, whereas beauty in hitpashtut takes its form from its content. The former takes its power from ideas, whose province is the hakarah, whereas the latter draws its power from the internal spark of life, from the chavayah and its source of energy, the Eternal Havayah. The implication here is that culture is yet another enterprise of the intellect, devoid of real life.


71

believed that nature is alive and deeply spiritual.” In other words, nature spirituality like

Gordon's was the norm throughout the course of the history of Jewish thought, not the

exception. Furthermore, he writes,

We must acknowledge that if we reject the sentience of nature, we are not rejecting paganism for the sake of Jewish belief; rather, we are rejecting some deeply rooted Jewish values in the name of a hyper-rationalist scientific world view.116

Such a “hyper-rationalist world view” can no less account for the emotional life of

the immigrant in his or her new home than it can motivate alienated individuals to make

radical changes in their lives, such as emigrating to Eretz Yisrael. Gordon's awareness

of this emotional component of the Zionists' adjustment to their new home sets his work

apart from that of many other Zionist ideologues.

Simon Schama writes that nature thinkers are “not just a motley collection of ec-

centrics rambling down memory lane,” but that they “believed that an understanding of

landscape's past traditions was a source of illumination for the present and future.”117

Gordon's idea that “a person, as far as s/he is human, must always be in Nature,” is not

only a philosophical axiom, but a prescription based in an ancient tradition that distills

generations of experience. That prescription was made, in various forms, by a large

number of thinkers in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. John Muir's campaign to cre-

ate National parks in the United States was motivated by a similar understanding. Gor-

don's prescription was a driving force in the agricultural development of Eretz Yisrael,

which was understood as a necessary step in the development of the nation in the mak-

ing. One of the points of pride of the Zionist project has been the fact that Israel is the

only country in the developed world that has seen an increase in its vegetation cover in

116 Benstein, p. 83, my italics117 Schama, p. 17


72

the 20th Century, an increase that is entirely the work of human hands. Schama argues

that such positive human influences on the landscape can be seen as “a cause not for

guilt and sorrow, but for celebration.”

Ecological Ethics

In ecological ethics, Gordon's work can also serve an important role. Uri Gordon

points out its similarities to 'deep ecology' (in the generic use of the term), as defined by

Naess.118 With his “social ecology,” Bookchin calls the eco-centric forms of deep ecolo-

gy into question as misanthropic and anti-humanist. Gordon would certainly have sided

with him. One of Bookchin's important differentiations is what he calls “first Nature”

and “second nature” - First Nature is biological evolution, while second nature is human

social evolution, or human nature. This is similar to Gordon's dual structure of Havayah

and chavayah. An ethical construction like that of deep ecology, in which human action

in Nature is a priori guilty, and must be, at best, limited, is unbearable and radically

alienating. Bookchin suggest that this kind of thinking encourages passivity, if not de-

spair, on the part of humans, with regard to non-human Nature. In such a construction,

humanity is the “enemy” of “free” Nature.

But, as we have seen, Gordon (and the Ecopsychologists) shares some of the deep

ecologists' world view, especially the more spiritual drive to cultivate a sense of interde-

pendence and interconnectedness, as part of the goal of life. Gordon's ethics recognize

118Naess differentiated “deep” and “shallow” ecologies by their approaches to society. Deep ecologies call for total reevaluation of social systems to address ecological concerns, shallow ones seek solutions within the system. In the 1990s, Al Gore was considered the quintessential “shallow” ecological activist, the World Wildlife Fund, working as it does with major corporations, the quintessential “shallow” ecological organization. Uri Gordon writes that “deep ecology ... is no longer a family name for all the approaches that see the ecological crisis as socially and philosophically deep. It has come to assume a more specific set of values, which I am not sure Gordon's philosophy would so easily subscribe to.”


73

human alienation as the source of environmental devastation, in so far as the human in-

dividual must choose to act, and will not choose destructive action if she is in a state of

hitpashtut. Her expanded self will act compassionately, because she recognizes Nature

as an extension of her self. In order to obtain the goal of such action, Gordon focuses on

solving the alienation between Human and Nature. This is similar to the deep ecologists'

drive to a “sense of interconnectness,”in which the human exists within a “web of life,”

but like Bookchin's “social ecology” seeks to avoid any activism that may be anti-hu-

manist, thus increasing alienation.

Therapeutic Applications of a Gordonesque “Life in Nature”

We have seen that Gordon's thought bridges these divergent approaches to ecological

ethics. New Mexico psychotherapist and activist Chellis Glendinning says “making dec-

larations about returning to the Earth to address our human pathologies can never suc-

ceed so long as they remain mere pleas to step outside and smell the grass.” Her work

with recovering addicts and victims of violence and sexual abuse has led her to the con-

clusion that “a traumatized state is not merely the domain of the Vietnam veteran or the

survivor of childhood abuse; it is the underlying condition of the domesticated psyche.”

The implications of a human centered ecological ethics show that such an empathetic

approach is effective, at least in alleviating human alienation.119 Practitioners of Ecopsy-

chology, environmental psychology, and wilderness therapy are applying scientific

methods of psychological study, showing that the basic axioms and prescriptions are

119Whether such an approach helps reduce environmental damage has yet to be seen. Eco-entrepreneur and eternal optimist Paul Hawken reports that more people around the world are involved in environmental justice organizations than in any other political movement ever seen in the history of humanity. (in his new book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, (Viking, 2007)


74

surprisingly effective. Michael J. Cohen proposes that “both the destruction of the

Earth's environment and people's isolation, stress and dysfunction stem from a funda-

mental denial of our connection to nature and its sensory voice.” His “Natural Systems

Thinking Process” teaches participants to reconnect with 53 natural senses, most of

which we suppress as a result of conditioning by the urban industrial society's focus on

sight, reason, and language. Participants experience a reduction in personality and eat-

ing disorders, an improvement in learning and other cognitive abilities, and a reduction

in violence and prejudice.120 His work has been substantiated by research with at-risk

students in alternative education, with addiction treatment and violence prevention pro-

grams. Israeli psychologist Ronen Berger has shown the application of similar princi-

ples in both educational and therapeutic settings with his “Nature Therapy.” Berger

writes “In most cases therapy is addressed as an indoor verbal activity in which the rela-

tionship between therapist and client stands at its center.” He proposes a different ap-

proach: “conducting [therapy] creatively in nature, with the environment being used not

only as a therapeutic setting but also as a medium and a partner in the process.” He ex-

plores the “therapeutic and educational impact ...on the participants and on nature’s

role” in the therapy. Children with special needs, both emotional and educational, were

taken out of the classroom, out of the built environment, into natural settings on the

grounds of their school. In the course of the research, the children made greater ad-

vances in communication and social behavior than their teachers expected. Berger has

used similar techniques with mature adults and seniors. Though the setting is different,

the similarity to Gordon's concept of “life in Nature” should be clear.

120Cohen, p. 19


75

Conclusions

It is very difficult to compare an ideological, nationalist discourse such as Gordon's

with a post-modern, universalist one such as ecopsychology. They stand at the opposite

ends of the 20th Century, with all its advances in science and technics, its wars and

genocides, and its population explosion that followed incredible improvements in the

material condition of the majority of humanity, improvements of kinds Gordon and his

contemporaries could only have dreamed. The logical positivism that promised to re-

place religion with science has lost its bearings amidst the growing uncertainty of quan-

tum mechanics.

In addition, the Zionist dream that Gordon and his contemporaries dreamed has been

largely achieved. The Jewish state is a reality, and no longer a goal. In its reality, it can

no more hope to live up to the dreams of its founders, builders and dreamers than a

child can hope to embody the hopes of its parents. Just as psychologists have shown us

that a child may feel paralyzed by parental expectations, it seems that Israel, too, as a

country, is paralyzed, torn between the wild divergence of the expectations of age-old

Jewish dreams and Zionist ideology on the one hand, and the increasingly harsh realities

of real life on the other. An honest application of a Gordonian ethics of expansion

might, perhaps, lead towards some solutions.121

121Since the publication of Sternhell's Founding Myths of Zionism, the postmodern critique of Zionism has expanded tremendously, as has the reaction to it. Within this very public argument strong emotions lead scholars and especially publicists to take positions that often betray a lack of nuance or even a lack of reading. The postmodern understanding that no text can be objective is well displayed in Yaron Ezrahi's memoir Rubber Bullets. Chapters 2 and 3 of this text critique the development of contemporary Israeli concepts of Nature and of privacy and personal space. A fuller study of Gordon's legacy should include these issues.


76

In his own life, Gordon was a realist. He knew the limits of human nature, he knew

his colleagues among the chalutzim were young, impatient, even impetuous. They need-

ed meaning, and especially, comfort. He knew that teaching by example would be much

more effective than sermonizing, and that what was important was the attempt, not its

outcome.122 When read only for his dreams of a national home for the Jews, Gordon

may sound as bad as Sternhell paints him. But as well as being a dreamer, Gordon

sought solutions for his own struggle with the harsh realities of life, and that helped him

to be a comfort to his compatriots. Muki Tzur writes: “The revolution that he embodied

in his own life, when at age forty-eight he turned to a life of labor in Eretz Yisrael, made

him a focus of admiration. He withstood his own personal struggle, lived the life of a la-

borer even though he knew secret despair... Perhaps because of this he was able to be

seen as a true comforter.”123

Catherine Roach points out that the difficulty of finding a way of discussing nature

that does not “imply our separation from that to which it refers. We are bound by, even

trapped within, the language and history of the Western modernism that has set up this

separation.”124 In Human and Nature, Gordon attempted to relate his own universal un-

derstanding of human nature in a truly Jewish language, embodying the Zionist call for

a new Hebrew philosophy that could take the place of the Jewish tradition that had

grown up detached from the soil of Eretz Yisrael. When viewed through the lens of

122Gordon's letters, especially those to the poet Rachel Blovstein, are seen by Ramon and Tzur as evidence of his caring relationships.

123Tzur, Kutonet, p79 The role Gordon played, as “Rebbe” to the chalutzim, may have been informed not only by the Rabbinical tradition, but also by the same societal movement that sought heroes and prophets in every movement. This idea was rooted in Hegel's teleology, Nietzsche's idea of the superman, in Russian folk literature, and in many religious messianic movements of the late 19th

century. See Bar Yosef.124 Roach, p. 13


77

Roszak's eight principles, Gordon also shines clearly as a precursor to ecopsychology.

The core of the mind, according to Roszak, is the ecological unconscious, and its con-

tents represent a record of cosmic evolution. According to Gordon, it is the sekhel ne'e-

lam, hidden in the infinite Havayah, that bridges human nature and Nature. Both seek to

awaken a sense of reciprocity between the self and Nature. Ecopsychology and Gor-

don's thought are both branches, perhaps, of the same intellectual tree. Notably, they

share a certain optimism, and an understanding that any solution to human society's

crises must include an opportunity for individual human success.


78

Bibliography

A. Writings of A. D. Gordon

i. Five Volumes, Tel Aviv: Published by HaPoel) ,כתבי א.ד.גורדון

HaTzair party, 1924-9), Referred to as First Edition

ii. ,Three Volumes, Jerusalem: The Zionist Library) ,כתבי א.ד.גורדון

1950-4), Referred to as Second Edition

iii. 1982הוצאת הספריה הציונית , :Jerusalem) ,מבחר כתבים ), Referred to

as Selected Writings

iv. Much of the work on this paper utilizes the digitized material avail-

able on the internet at http://www.benyehuda.org/

v. Selected Essays, translated by Frances Burnce, (New York: League

for Labor Palestine, 1938), Referred to as “Burnce”

B. About the life and writings of A. D. Gordon

i. Amir, Yehoyada, "ארץ, טבע ואדם: השתרשות בנופה של ארץ ישראל על

ארץ ישראל בהגות היהודית במאה in ,”פי משנתו של אהרון דוד גורדון

ed. Aviezer Ravitzky (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2004) ,העשרים

ii. “Towards a Life of Expansion: Education as a religious deed in A. D.

Gordon's philosophy” (in Abiding Challenges, Research Perspectives in

Jewish Education, ed. Rich, Yisrael and Rosenak, Michael (London: Fre-

und, Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1999)

iii. Gedzelman, David, “What Does the Hour Demand? Environmental-

ism as Self-Realization” in Bernstein (see below)

iv. Gordon, Uri, “Gordon the Green: The Ecological Philosophy of A.D.

Gordon”, (Tel Aviv: unpublished paper, 2000)

v. Kolat, Yisrael, "ארץ-ישראל במחשבת תנועת העבודה" (“The Land of

Israel in the Thought of the Labor Movement”) in Ravitzky, 2004

vi. Ohana, David, “Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Nietzsche's influence on the

'New Hebrew'” in Mitos ve-Zikaron: Gilguleiha Shel ha-Toda'ah ha-Yis-

raelit (Myth and Memory: Transfigurations of Israeli Consciousness)


79

eds. David Ohana and Robert Wistrich (Jerusalem: Van Leer Inst. 1997),

as accessed online at:

http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/zarathustra_in_jerusalem.ht

ml

vii.Ramon, Einat, "Equality and Ambivalence: The Political Repercus-

sions of A.D. Gordon's Maternal Ethics”, in Nashim: A Journal of Jew-

ish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 3 (Jerusalem: Schechter In-

stitute for Jewish Studies, 2000)

viii.God the Mother: A Critique of Domination in the Religious Zionist

Works of A.D.Gordon (1856- 1922), Ph.D. Dissertation (Stanford, 2000)

ix. Rose, Herbert, The Life and Thought of A.D. Gordon, Pioneer,

Philosopher and Prophet of Modern Israel (New York: Bloch, 1964)

x. Schechter, Yosef, משנתו של א.ד. גורדון (The Mishna of A.D.

Gordon), (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1957)

xi. Shapira, Avraham, אור החיים ביום קטנות (The Kabbalistic and Chas-

sidic Sources of A.D. Gordon's Thought), (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1996)

xii.Strassberg-Dayan, Sarah, יחיד אומה ואנושות – תפישת האדם

Individual, Nation, Humanity - The) במשנותיהם של א.ד. גורדון והרב קוק

Concept of Man in A.D. Gordon and Rabbi Kook) , (Tel Aviv: Hakib-

butz Hameuchad, 1995)

xiii. Sternhell, Zeev, The Founding Myths of Israel: nationalism, social-

ism and the making of the Jewish state, trans., David Meisels. (Princeton:

1999, Princeton University Press) as accessed at: http://press.princeton.e-

du/chapters/s6183.html

xiv.Sweid, Eliezer, היחיד: עולמו של א.ד. גורדון (Tel Aviv: Am Oved,

1970)

xv."ארץ ישראל בחוויה הציונית: בין מסורת למודרניות” (“The Land of Israel

in the Zionist Experience: Between Tradition and Modernity”), in Rav-

itzky, 2004


80

xvi.".החיבור בין הסתכלות מדעית וקיומית בתורת "האדם והטבע" לא.ד

The Connection Between Scientific and Existential Observation") "גורדון

in A.D. Gordon's Human and Nature"), in אלפיים , vol. 23, (Tel Aviv:

Am Oved, 2002)

xvii.Tzur, Muki, editor and collector, .את אינך בודדה במרום, מכתבים מא

.You Are Not Alone in Heaven, Letters to and from A. D) , ד. גורדון ואליו

Gordon), (Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 1998)

xviii. ללא כותנת פסים (LeLo Kutonet Pasim – Without a Striped Coat),

(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987)

C. General Jewish Studies

i. Aberbach, David. Turning Points in Jewish Intellectual History, (Gor-

donsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

ii. Ben Aharon, Yariv, שרשי יניקה (The Roots of Sustenance), (Efal: Efal

Seminar Center, 1984)

iii. Bar Yosef, Hamutal, “הציונות על רקע התרבות הרוסית,” (“Zionism

Against the Background of Russian Culture”), in קריאות ושריקות, (Tel

Aviv: Carmel, 2005)

iv. Mysticism in the“) “מיסטיקה בספרות העברית החדשה: הערות מבוא“

New Hebrew Literature: Introductory Remarks”), in קריאות ושריקות

v. Elior, Rachel, “HaBaD, the Contemplative Ascent to God,” in Green,

Arthur, ed., Jewish Spirituality, vol. II, (New York: Crossroads, 1988)

vi. Jacobs, Louis, “The Uplifting of Sparks in Later Jewish Mysticism,”

in Green, 1988

vii.Scholem, Gershom, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, (New York:

Schocken, 1954 (1941))

D. Zionism and Ecology

i. Benstein, Jeremy, The Way Into Judaism and the Environment,

(Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2006)

ii. Bernstein, Ellen, ed. Ecology & the Jewish Spirit, (Woodstock, VT:

Jewish Lights, 1998)


81

iii. Elon, Ari, Hyman, Naomi and Waskow, Arthur, eds., Trees, the Earth

and Torah: A Tu Bishvat Anthology (Philadelphia: JPS, 2000)

iv. Herzberg, Arthur, The Zionist Idea, (New York: Atheneum, 1959)

v. Oren, Michal, “כי תבואו אל הארץ ונטעתם כל עץ...מאכל" (“For when

you come into the land you will plant every tree... that is fruit bearing”),

Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies Faculty Forum. (As accessed via

the internet: http://www.schechter.ac.il/bima.asp?ID=18 on 11 April,

2007)

vi. Tal, Alon, Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History

of Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)

vii.Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, ed., Judaism and Ecology (Cambridge: Har-

vard University Press, 1998)

viii.Waskow, Arthur, ed. Torah of the Earth, vol. II (Woodstock, VT:

Jewish Lights, 2001)

E. Ecology and EcoPsychology

i. Bookchin, Murray, “What is Social Ecology?” in Environmental Phi-

losophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, edited by M.E. Zim-

merman, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993)

ii. The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism,

2nd ed. revised (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995)

iii. Which Way for the Ecology Movement? (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1994)

iv. Cohen, Michael J., The Web of Life Imperative, (Friday Harbor, WA:

Institute of Global Education, 2003)

v. Davis, John, "Overview of Ecopsychology”, part of course website at

Naropa Univerisity (http://www.naropa.edu/faculty/johndavis/ep/ecop-

sy.html accessed Dec. 4, 2006)

vi. "What is Ecopsychology?” (http://www.johnvdavis.com/ep/epdef.htm

accessed Apr. 1, 2007)

vii.“Transpersonal Dimensions of Ecopsychology,” originally published

in The Humanistic Psychologist, 1998 (Spring/Summer/Autumn), vol 26


82

(nos. 1-3, Special issue on Humanistic Psychology and Ecopsychology,

pp. 60-100, http://www.johnvdavis.com/ep/thpeptp.htm, accessed April

12, 2007.

viii.Glendinning, Chellis, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from

Western Civilization (Boston: Shambala, 1994)

ix. Heise, Ursula, “Science and Ecocriticism,” The American Book Re-

view 18.5 (July-August 1997)

x. Humphrey, Mathew, “'Nature' in Deep Ecology and Social Ecology:

Contesting the Core,” in Journal of Political Ideologies (2000), 5(2), pp.

247-268

xi. Roach, Catherine, Mother/Nature, (Indianapolis: Indiana University

Press, 2003)

xii.Roszak, Theodore, The Voice of the Earth (Grand Rapids: Phanes

Press, 2nd edition, 2001)

xiii.Roszak, Theodore, Gomes, Mary, and Kanner, Allen, eds. Ecopsy-

chology (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995)

xiv.Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins,

1995)

daniel burstyn gordon ecopsychology ma thesis.pdf

Documents