Land and Desire in Early Zionism

3 Dissolving Boundaries

50 3 DissolvingBoundaries The Land of Israel is soil that the halutzim crave. Their desire is channeled first of all through labor, working the land. All halutzim who immigrate to Palestine cultivate the land. Some do so for a few days before turning to other Zionist activities . Others make labor on the land the labor of their lives. In either case, contact with the soil through working the land is a practice that constitutes the pioneer desire for the Land of Israel. It is the basis of the pioneer experience of being-inthe -Land-of-Israel. Through labor, the halutzim “unite” and “merge” with the land, are “assimilated ” and “soaked up” by it.1 Only working the land, wrote HaPoel HaTzair cofounder Eliezer Shohat, can allow for the weaving of those threads that enable true, inner connection with it. Shohat distinguished between two types of connection —mechanical-external and organic-internal. Working the land enables the latter type, he maintained. And such a connection creates the same profound estheticandspiritualrelationshipthatanartisthaswithapicturehehaspainted— as opposed to the legal, superficial, possessive relationship experienced by the person who purchases land.2 Um Juni settler Yosef Weitz wrote to a friend in the exile that he, living outside the Land, could not truly grasp the meaning of “feeling the earth under one’s feet” to which Zionism aspired, including the need to possess and cultivate Jewish soil in the Land of Israel. The only person who could “feel the need, live it, touch it in all its actuality is one who has embraced the soil in his hands, dug it, who has thrust his plow into it, who has rooted his tree in it and grown his grain and produce in it.”3 A. D. Gordon took an even more radical position, identifying pioneer labor on the soil of the Land of Israel as part of nature’s work itself. In effect, Gordon negated the customary relationship between the laborer and his environment and replaced it with a state of diffusion between them. Through labor, on the land in particular, the halutz amalgamates himself with nature and becomes part of it. Gordon asserted that while at labor, however arduous and prosaic it may be— “laden with the profane,” in his words—an ineffable moment always arrives when the laborer senses his entire being interwoven with the work of nature, a Dissolving Boundaries 51 moment when he begins to penetrate nature, to become rooted in it, and to grow and live within nature itself, partaking in nature’s work of creation. “At such moments ,” Gordon wrote, “the human heart is seized by a kind of eternal elation, divine purity. The furthest depths penetrate him. And it seems that here he sends roots down into the earth in which he digs, that he, too, like all that grows around him, is nourished by the sun’s rays, by the sustenance of the sky; that he, too, lives a common life with the tiniest blade of grass, with every flower and every tree, living intensely within the depths of nature, rising up from it and growing above into the spaces of the great world.”4 The halutzim worked the land in a variety of ways, with their bare hands and using tools—plow,hoe,mechanizedequipment.Ofalltypesoflabor,theyperceivedplowingasthefullestrealizationoftheirbondwiththeirland .Manytestifiedthatplowing drew them out of the concrete and prosaic reality of hard labor, which was often dif- ficult and cruel, into an ecstasy in which they sensed the almost metaphysical Gordonian bond between themselves and the Land.5 In his diary, David Gilad, a member of Degania, admits that plowing entirely transported him in such a way. All parts of his life entered into harmony with one another. His life and his labor became a realization of utopia. “The material body ascends to a spiritual height. This is the eternal plowman. His plow clangs among shadows and spirits, and he, the eternal, passes from field to field, from boundary to boundary,” Gilad wrote.6 Pioneer desire for the Land of Israel also becomes actualized by direct physical contact.7 The halutzim “grip” the land with their fingernails and “plant” their feet in it.8 At the end of a day’s labor, Yehudit Edelman of Ein Harod had difficulty leaving the land, her land, so she lay down on it. “You prostrate yourself on the land that breathes with quiet weariness,” she wrote, “before sinking into night rest, listening to the rustle around you.”9 A man treading...