Background
Aaron was born in the village of Troyano, Podolia (region in present-day Ukraine) on June 9, 1856. Gordon was the only child of a well-to-do family of Orthodox Jews.
(FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION: 1919Briefe aus Palstina FACSIMILE...)
FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION: 1919Briefe aus Palstina FACSIMILE Originally published by Berlin Welt in 1919. Book will be printed in black and white, with grayscale images. Book will be 6 inches wide by 9 inches tall and soft cover bound. Any foldouts will be scaled to page size. If the book is larger than 1000 pages, it will be printed and bound in two parts. Due to the age of the original titles, we cannot be held responsible for missing pages, faded, or cut off text. 92 pages.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008NBUDP0/?tag=2022091-20
(excellent condition in the interior of the paperback book...)
excellent condition in the interior of the paperback book, pages are clean, binding is tight, however there is a heavy shelf wear, scuff spots and creases on the cover, 378 pages, third paperback edition 1973, published by B'Nai B'Rith Department of Adult Jewish Education (J-22)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0978998065/?tag=2022091-20
Aaron was born in the village of Troyano, Podolia (region in present-day Ukraine) on June 9, 1856. Gordon was the only child of a well-to-do family of Orthodox Jews.
Because of Gordon's poor health, he was taught the traditional Jewish subjects by a private tutor. Later he studied at the towns of Golovnievsk and Obodovka, where he lived at the house of his relatives and met his cousin and future wife, Feigel Tartakov. For a year he studied in Vilna, after which he went back to his parents. Again Gordon had a private teacher for Jewish studies, but at the same time he devoted himself to the study of modern languages (Russian, German, French, and Hebrew), which gave him the equivalent of a high school education.
After Gordon was rejected because of his health by the Russian army, he married and for 23 years, almost until his emigration to Palestine, he lived in the village of Mohilna.
Despite the fact that he was employed at the office of his wealthy relative Baron Ginzburg, he found it distasteful to support his family by the favors of his cousin, especially since no creative work was involved in his position.
At the age of 48, after Gordon's parents had died and his son and daughter were independent, he arrived as a pioneer to Palestine. He sought work as a laborer but the farmers would not employ him, and he refused to consider an office position which was offered to him by the Jewish national authorities.
Finally he started to work in the citrus orchards at Petach Tikvah, and as a result of the poor conditions under which he lived he took sick. Friends took care of him. Because he did not like to accept favors, he repaid all expenses to his benefactors after his recovery.
Gordon did not like to attach himself permanently to one place or group. He moved from place to place and, finally, in 1912, settled as an agriculture worker in Degania, where he died 10 years later.
In his doctrine of love for, and return to, nature, Gordon was a follower of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Leo Tolstoy. But he disagreed with Tolstoy's belief that to give up the urban life was a sacrifice.
Gordon considered that the Jew who left the Jewish Pale in Russia was not sacrificing anything but was taking part in building his individual freedom and that of his national community-the Jewish people.
Gordon also claimed, because of the many roads to Jewish redemption, that there was a need for an integration of ideas. As a result of this, he found a synthesis between the two major spiritual opponents of his generation, Ahad Haam's spiritual nationalism and M. Y. Berdichevsky's material individualism.
The result was Gordon's doctrine of the "religion of work, " which dictated the return of the Jew to nature and manual labor in order to renew his source of life. These ideas formed the basis of his Labor Zionism and became a cornerstone of the Palestinian non-Marxist labor movement.
Gordon died of throat cancer on Kibbutz Degania Alef at the age of 66.
(excellent condition in the interior of the paperback book...)
(FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION: 1919Briefe aus Palstina FACSIMILE...)
Although formerly an Orthodox Jew, Gordon rejected religion later in his life. Students of his writings have found that Gordon was greatly influenced the Hassidic movement and Kabbalah. Many have also found parallels between his ideas and those of his contemporary, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the spiritual father of Religious Zionism.
Gordon's moods alternated between enormous frustration and great hope for the future. He believed that an idealistic new generation of creative Jews would emerge in the Land of Israel, with a high sense of morals, a deep spiritual commitment, and a commitment to their fellow human beings. Toward the end of his life, however, he preferred to isolate himself in Nature. From a letter he wrote to Rachel the Poet, it seems that he grew more and more frustrated with people's petty squabbles and selfish interests.
Gordon was an early member of the Hibbat Zion movement.
Quotations:
Gordon wrote:
"The Jewish people has been completely cut off from nature and imprisoned within city walls for two thousand years. We have been accustomed to every form of life, except a life of labor- of labor done at our behalf and for its own sake. It will require the greatest effort of will for such a people to become normal again. We lack the principal ingredient for national life. We lack the habit of labor… for it is labor which binds a people to its soil and to its national culture, which in its turn is an outgrowth of the people's toil and the people's labor. . .. We, the Jews, were the first in history to say: "For all the nations shall go each in the name of its God" and "Nations shall not lift up sword against nation" - and then we proceed to cease being a nation ourselves. "
"As we now come to re-establish our path among the ways of living nations of the earth, we must make sure that we find the right path. We must create a new people, a human people whose attitude toward other peoples is informed with the sense of human brotherhood and whose attitude toward nature and all within it is inspired by noble urges of life-loving creativity. All the forces of our history, all the pain that has accumulated in our national soul, seem to impel us in that direction. .. we are engaged in a creative endeavor the like of which is itself not to be found in the whole history of mankind: the rebirth and rehabilitation of a people that has been uprooted and scattered to the winds. .. " (A. D. Gordon, "Our Tasks Ahead" 1920).
"We are a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil, there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense, but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost non-existent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other people either. "
Quotes from others about the person
A summary of his thinking on Jewish-Arab relations can be found in his work Mibachutz, where he wrote:
"Our relations to the Arabs must rest on cosmic foundations. Our attitude toward them must be one of humanity, of moral courage which remains on the highest plane, even if the behavior of the other side is not all that is desired. Indeed their hostility is all the more a reason for our humanity. "
Gordon married his cousin, Faige Tartakov, at a young age and had seven children with her, though only two of them survived.