THE TIME HAS COME (1906[57])

THE TIME HAS COME (1906^[57])

You are right, my friends: “Now the time has come to begin planting our literature in the land of its birth and on its own native soil.”^[58] But it seems to me that there is a wider and a deeper foundation for this statement than you give to it in your announcement. The time is ripe for your enterprise not merely “because there is already a considerable number of Jews in Palestine and the neighbouring countries, and so Hebrew literature, its language being common to the Jews of Palestine, has a function to perform in the sphere of national culture.” If that were the only reason, we Hebrew writers outside Palestine, though we should certainly have welcomed the new adventure and have been glad to enjoy the literary fruit of Palestine, should not have felt it our duty to take an active part in a local Palestinian literary movement, created only for the Jews in Palestine, whose circumstances are known to us only by hearsay, or from the visitor’s brief experience. If none the less I feel—and I am sure that other writers will feel the same—that it is my duty to take part in your undertaking, that can only be because it is not merely the condition of the Jews in Palestine, but the condition of our people in general that now convinces us of the necessity of reuniting our land and our language—those sundered halves of a single whole, those twin main pillars of our national life, which are both so near to us and so far 92from us—and of making them both together, by the establishment of a worthy literary centre in the land, a single mighty channel through which the influence of our national spirit should be carried to all the lands of our dispersion.

“Now convinces us,” I say: although it is already many years since we began to recognise that the Hebrew spirit is yearning towards its own land, because its life in exile is not a healthy and a complete life. But this recognition itself could not get free all at once from the fetters of galuth, and did not prevent us from dreaming all those years of the revival of our language and literature outside Palestine. Now realities have shown the futility of our dream, and we learn perforce from experience what we would not learn willingly from logic, that just as the Hebrew spirit cannot develop as it should without a free centre “on its own native soil,” so, too, are its outer vestments, our language and literature, under the same disability; and all our efforts to revive them on strange soil will not avail except for a short time—until the hammer of an alien environment strikes out a spark which will destroy in a moment what we have spent many years and the last remnant of our strength in building up.^[59]

How slow is the development of an idea in the human mind! Every new idea is born with great travail, and even after its birth there is a long lapse of time and a heavy loss of force between its dawn and its noontide splendour. At first it appears shrouded in mist, luminous yet obscure, and its faint rays shimmer on the 93surface of the human spirit without being able to penetrate to the depths below. Only little by little, after much labour and hard struggling, is the mist dispelled, and the light of the idea grows stronger and floods all the dark corners of the mind. Then we look into these corners, and wonder at ourselves for not having been conscious before of the chaos of error and contradiction which held its own there while the light was already playing on the surface above.

Hard were the birth-pangs of our national idea in the form of “Zionism,” and the mists shrouded it at its birth. In the last generation the Jewish people had settled down to its exile; it waited for the mercy of Heaven and the kindness of the world, scarcely felt how its limbs were being torn asunder and scattered in all directions, and asked no great boon of the future, except a peaceful life and a livelihood among the nations. Then a hurricane arose, and thunderously swept away the hope of kindness from the world, yes, and even the hope of mercy from heaven. And the clarion-call went forth among the exiled people: You wish for a peaceful life and livelihood? Then get you up and go to your national land, and look no more for crumbs from strangers’ tables: for there is neither peace nor livelihood except for each people in its own land.

That was the dawn of our new idea. The memory of our historic land, which had become a lifeless thing, a mere book-memory, became once more a living emotional force, and in its re-birth awoke our love for the rest of our heritage, which now appeared in a new light to many for whom it had lost all actual value. If we say—so these men reasoned—that we have a national 94land, to which we wish to return in very deed and not only in prayer, then we admit, and want others to admit, that we are actually a nation, and not merely a Church. And if we are a nation, then we must have a national spirit, which distinguishes us from other nations, and we must value and protect it as every other nation does with its national spirit. And if we value our national spirit, where shall we find it if not in the heritage of our past, and especially in our national language and literature, in which each generation stored up its spiritual treasure, and left to its heirs in the next the best fruits of its thought, its secret longings, its half-uttered sighs? Thus Chibbath Zion began by giving an impulse to the “spiritual revival”—the fostering of our language and literature, the establishment of national schools, and so forth—not as a separate and distinct ideal, but as a necessary consequence of the ideal of a peaceful life in Palestine, as a sort of proof of our being really a distinct nation and possessing all the attributes of a nation, and being therefore both in need and deserving of that which we have not now—our national land.

But gradually the Zionist idea began to get clearer, and events in Palestine and elsewhere helped it to emerge from the mists of visionary hopes. Then some of its followers reversed the sequence of ideas. It is not the case, they said, that the redemption of the people is the goal of all our efforts, and the spiritual revival only a means to it, and a branch of it. On the contrary, the spiritual revival is our real object, whether we know it or not, and the whole purpose of the settlement to be built up in Palestine is merely to serve as its basis.

It is true—such was the train of reasoning of this 95dissident section—that galuth is a very evil thing, and that the only way to escape the ills which are inevitably bound up with it is to escape from galuth itself. But this truth of itself tells us nothing, if we cannot at the same time discover the way to “the only way.” To say to a poor man: “If you want always to be sure of a meal, get rid of your poverty and become rich!” or to a sick man: “If you want to be free of your pains, get up from your bed and be well!”—to say this is to say nothing, unless at the same time you show the poor man how to get rich, and the sick man how to get well. Now Zionism has not shown us how to get out of galuth. For all the sophistication in the world cannot do away with the cruelty of hard facts, which do not allow us to picture to ourselves, even approximately and in a general way, how our work in Palestine, even if in time it develops up to the very maximum of what is possible, and covers the whole land with gardens and orchards and factories, can accomplish this unprecedented miracle: that so small a country as ours should absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time, year by year, without coming to such a crisis as would drive out its old and its new inhabitants in even greater numbers. But if this miracle does not happen, and the Palestinian settlement develops only little by little, concurrently with the development of the country’s economic resources, then it is impossible to deny that its gradual expansion will not diminish the number of Jews in other countries (since their natural increase will offset the exodus to Palestine), and will not put an end to their wandering and scattering to all the corners of the globe under economic and social pressure, which is brought to bear on them from time to time in every country in 96which they become too numerous. In other words: the hope for an “ingathering of the exiles” has no basis in reality; and even in that distant future to which we look forward, when the Palestinian settlement will have reached its full development, and the Jews there will grow and multiply and fill all the land and make it their own by their work—even then the majority of Jews will be scattered in strange lands, and their life in those lands will even then depend on the good-will of the peoples among whom they live as a small minority, and the dominant peoples will even then look askance at the growth of this “alien body” in their midst if it dares to rise above a certain level: and finally galuth in the physical sense will still be with us, and only a part of the people will have escaped from it—that comparatively small part which will have had the good fortune to rebuild the waste places of our land and to attain national freedom there, while all the rest of the people, scattered in strange countries, will remain as to its external condition just as it is, and no fleet will set sail from Palestine to protect it from persecution.

But if this is so, have we a right to regard the rebuilding of Palestine as an ideal for the whole nation, and its success as vital to the hopes of the whole nation?

We have! For galuth is twofold—it is material and spiritual. On the one hand it cramps the individual Jew in his material life, by taking from him the possibility of carrying on his struggle for existence, with all his strength and in complete freedom, like any other man; and on the other hand it cramps no less our people as a whole in its spiritual life, by taking from it the possibility of safeguarding and developing its national individuality according to its own spirit, in complete 97freedom, like any other people. This spiritual cramping, which our ancestors used to call, in their own fashion, “the exile of the Divine Presence,” and for which they shed not less tears than for the exile of the people, has become especially painful in our time, since the overthrow of the artificial wall behind which the spirit of our people entrenched itself in past generations, in order to be able to live its own life; and now we and our national life are enslaved to the spirit of the peoples around us, and we can no longer save our national individuality from being undermined as a consequence of the necessity of assimilating ourselves to the spirit of the alien life, which is too strong for us. Now it is this problem of spiritual galuth which really finds its solution in the establishment of a national “refuge” in Palestine: a refuge not for all Jews who need peace and bread, but for the spirit of the people, for that distinctive cultural form, the result of a historical development of thousands of years, which is still strong enough to live and to develop naturally in the future, if only the fetters of galuth are removed. And though the refuge contain only a tenth part of the people, this tenth part will be sacred to the whole people, which will see in it a picture of its national individuality, of what it is like when it lives its own life, without external constraint. And who can estimate in advance the strength of the influence which this national centre will exert on all the circumference, and the radical changes which that influence will produce in the life of the whole people?

Some of the Chovevé Zion arrived at this idea, as I have said, some eighteen years ago.^[60] Had they succeeded 98in making it common property, it might have saved both the people and the land from many mistakes. But ideas do not develop quickly in the human mind, and this idea, like others, met with formidable obstacles, which did not allow it to penetrate fully into men’s minds. When this opinion of a minority was made public, a shudder went through the Zionist camp, as though the presence of a destructive enemy had been detected. Nor was this instinct wholly mistaken. The movement was then only just beginning to spread among the masses, and here was an attempt to give it a form which must alienate the masses, who want above all things an escape from their material troubles! It is possible that men did occasionally say to themselves: “What does it matter? Those few who can really find a quiet life and a livelihood in Palestine at the present time—will they refuse to go there unless they are assured beforehand that they are bringing complete redemption to the whole people? And the men who work for the ideal—they are of course bound to get quite clear in their own minds about the real purpose of their work, with due regard to actualities, so that they may set about their task in the way best suited to achieve their purpose.” It may be that people occasionally indulged in such reflections in secret. But we live in the age of democracy, and everybody believes that only the masses are the source of light and of progress, and that any ideal which the masses cannot grasp is mere nonsense. While it is true that in those days the democratic character of Zionism was not proclaimed from every house-top, as it is to-day, yet even the early Chovevé Zion were unconsciously democrats in this sense, that they regarded the masses not merely as material for the 99national building, but as conscious architects, deliberately intent on making such a building as the national purpose required. Hence they were scared by the idea that their propaganda would not go down with the masses if they put forward the spiritual revival as their only object; and they went on telling the masses that redemption was at hand if only they would give their whole-hearted support. But in spite of all this they did not succeed in creating a real mass-movement, because the masses not only heard what they said, but also saw what they achieved—and what they achieved was not calculated to confirm the belief that this was the way to redemption. It was only when western Zionism came and proclaimed that it had found a new and “practical” way to achieve the object—the way of diplomacy in the courts of East and West—that the masses followed its flag for a short time, believing in their simplicity that diplomatic documents would be the “paper bridge”^[61] over which they would soon pass to the land of their fathers—and then an end to galuth and its miseries. But when the hopes of diplomacy were disappointed, the masses once more lost faith in the possibility of escape from galuth; and when at the same time they saw a slight chance of an improvement of their condition in the land of their exile in a not distant future, they turned in that direction. So the masses are deserting the Zionist flag before our eyes, and—what is still more painful—they sometimes take the Zionist flag with them and tack it on to the flag of another camp.

When the history of Zionism comes to be written, the historian will not be able to pass in silence over an 100extraordinary inconsistency of contemporary Zionist propagandists and writers. When they are trying to attract the people to their flag, they wax enthusiastic over the lofty mission of Zionism, which is to end our exile and to deliver the Jews from all their troubles; and at the same time they gird or scoff at the “spiritual” Zionists, whose unfeeling hearts soar skywards while their brethren are afflicted and their blood is shed like water—and so forth, and so forth. But these same men, when they confront the opponents of Zionism, who ask to be told clearly how Zionism can end our exile if it cannot gather all our scattered hosts into Palestine—then they take refuge in the spiritual mission of Zionism, and instead of “blood shed like water,” they expatiate on our spiritual slavery and the impossibility of developing our spiritual powers in exile. This jumping about from one side to the other, which shows clearly how weak is the belief in a material redemption of those who stand up for it, has become especially noticeable since the question of “Uganda” came up and since the birth of “Territorialism,” which was really latent in the Zionism of material redemption. All those who had become Zionists only for the sake of saving the people from persecution could not understand how it was possible to reject the Uganda proposal, or any other similar proposal which seemed to offer us the desired salvation—“a secure home of refuge”—merely on the ground that we wanted Palestine and Palestine only, though we did not know when, if ever, it would be given to us. And what was the answer of the “Zion-Zionists” (a name, coined in the Uganda period, which also will interest the future historian)? Did they try to show that our scattered hosts could be gathered more quickly 101and more easily into Palestine, or that in Palestine we should be better able politically to protect the Jews of the Diaspora? No! They had recourse to the “spirit,” and openly admitted the bitter truth that neither in Palestine nor in any other territory could we gather all our exiles from the four corners of the globe; that the object of Zionism was only to establish “a secure home of refuge” for a minority of the people, which should become the centre of the whole people and influence it spiritually; and that this object could be achieved only in Palestine, the birth-place of our national spirit, and in connection with our historic memories and so forth. In fact, they adopted the whole philosophy of the “skyward soaring” school, only adding a few misplaced “political” phrases for form’s sake. But after the Seventh Congress,^[62] when the doubters had left the organisation and the “Zion-Zionists” were left to themselves, with nobody to ask awkward questions, they reverted to their old tactics; and now once more they dangle before the people the old promises of “an end to galuth.” Meanwhile, however, a general movement for liberty, affecting all the nations in the Empire, arose in the land of our exile^[63]; and in our own midst new propagandists began to hold out to the people new promises and to speak to it in a new language, which the masses found very agreeable. And so the Zionists began to change their tune, so as to win over the masses. “Political work in the Diaspora?—Of course! It is an essential part of Zionist work. Revolution? Why, 102who so revolutionary as the Zionists? Socialism?—The very basis of Zionism!” And not alone that, but even the Palestinian work, to which in the end the Zionists returned, after they had awoke from the dreamland of diplomacy, took on a new epithet: “real work in Palestine.” The public must understand that Zionists are not “reactionaries” pursuing a “spiritual” will-o’-the-wisp, but genuine “realists,” and their work in Palestine is “real” work. But if at the Eighth Congress the opponents of “real” work (there are still such among Zionists) propound their doubts again, and demand an explanation of the value of such work from the point of view of the ingathering of the exiles and the redemption of the people, then, I fear, the champions of “real” work will be compelled once more to have recourse to the “spirit” in order to justify their “realism.” For the fact is that all work in Palestine, of whatever kind, material or spiritual, so long as it is properly done, is “real” (that is, calculated to achieve its object and in harmony with actual conditions) only from the point of view of the spiritual redemption, because whatever strengthens our material and spiritual position in Palestine is a source of added strength to our corporate national spirit, and therefore brings us nearer by much or by little to our spiritual goal. But as for the redemption of the people and the end of galuth—that “real” goal is no more brought nearer by all this “real” work than we get nearer to the moon by jumping.

Thus Zionism is always running after the masses—and the masses run away from it.

A well-known economist has correctly indicated one of the principal causes through which the doctrine of Marx 103made greater headway than similar doctrines before it. Marx, he points out, made his socialistic movement the movement of a definite section of society—the “proletariate”—whose condition and wants inevitably produce in each of its individual members a deep-rooted and powerful desire for a change in the social order, and which is therefore really fitted to fight unitedly and patiently for the attainment of the ideal that promises the satisfaction of their common demands. His predecessors in the development of Socialism, on the other hand, appealed vaguely and in general fashion to “the people,” “the poor,” and similar undefined entities.^[64]

A similar statement may be made about Zionism, though in a negative sense. One of the principal causes that have prevented Zionism hitherto from finding a firm and secure foundation is the fact that it has not so far succeeded in recognizing and defining its own “proletariate”—its natural body of supporters, which is really fitted to fight unwearyingly for the Zionist ideal, without being turned aside to follow any other. From its inception until the present day, Zionism has appealed to “the people” generally. But “the people” is not its natural support, because the only want of which the great majority of the people is sufficiently conscious—the want which alone, therefore, can form the basis of common national work—is the need for freedom from material pressure. So soon as we leave this common ground, we find the people divided into parties and classes, whose conscious demands differ in each case, and whose relation to our national life, therefore, in each case takes on a different form. If, then, Zionism could really point the way to our material regeneration, 104it would doubtless unite under its banner the whole people, without distinction of party or class, except, perhaps, that small minority which is already “emancipated” from all national ties, and stands on the threshold of another way of escape from galuth. But, as I have already said, the people does not see in Zionism the way to its material regeneration, and cannot see it there, because it is not there. The unsophisticated masses have always a “feeling for reality” that prevents them instinctively from believing in promises inconsistent with the reality before their eyes. It is only occasionally, in times of deep distress from which there is no escape, that the masses will listen to a promise of redemption that lets a ray of comfort into their hearts; but they turn away and disregard it so soon as they see hope of a remedy more in touch with actualities. It is not strange, therefore, that Zionism, brief though its life has been, has already experienced many a sudden rise and many a sudden fall in the popular estimation, its fortune varying with circumstances. But is a people subject to such changes fitted to be the rank and file of a movement based on a long history, confronted by numerous obstacles, and demanding strenuous, wisely-directed, ordered effort, without sudden leaps backwards and forwards?

I think, then, that the course of events will compel Zionism to come gradually to understand itself and its supporters: to understand itself as a national movement of a spiritual character, whose aim is to satisfy the demand for a true and free national life in accordance with our distinctive spirit; and to find its supporters in that nationalist section which is sufficiently conscious, in all its individual members, of this demand, and which 105in a certain sense may be called a “spiritual proletariate.”

For, in spite of all the numerous latter-day sections of Jews, with their abbreviated names, it is still doubtful whether among all our “S.D.” and “S.S.”^[65] with their ceaseless talk about their “proletariate psychology,” there is really any considerable number of members who can properly be held to belong to the proletariate in the Socialist sense of the word. The mission of the proletariate is to hasten the Socialist solution by the concentration of wealth; and this mission can be fulfilled only by those who work in large industrial undertakings. The work of the master-workman and his assistants is not proletariate work, because, so far from hastening, it hinders that solution. Now the working-class Jew has practically no place in the large industrial undertakings; generally speaking, the so-called proletariate section of the Jews belongs to the class of master-workmen. But, on the other hand, there is among the Jews, and only among them, a proletariate in another sense—in the sense indicated by the combination of “national” and “spiritual.” The position and the needs of this proletariate, which are common to all its individual members, compel it to feel a deep-rooted and powerful desire for a change in the established order; but the change desired in this case is not a concentration of the means of production, but just the opposite. What is wanted is a new means of production, wherewith to create a product of a special character. Among all civilised nations ours is the only one that has no special means of production of its own wherewith to create its spiritual and intellectual wealth, but is compelled to 106make use of the means provided by other nations—their languages, their literatures, their schools and universities, and so forth—and thus to enrich the owners of these means of production by its work. But the proletariate that produces material wealth receives in payment at least a part of the wealth produced by its labour, and only the surplus is left to the owner of the means of production; whereas in our case almost all the result of our toil goes to swell the wealth of others. Our own national treasury is impoverished and empty; our own distinctive spirit dwindles and dwindles. And yet we are rich in spiritual and intellectual powers, and do productive work in every branch of life. This condition of things is distressing to all Jews whose kinship with their people is not one of blood merely, but whose national consciousness and general culture have developed to such a point that they can both understand and feel the deep tragedy of this national degradation. For the people so degraded produced thousands of years ago, for itself and with its own means of production, a store of spiritual wealth from which the world still draws sustenance; and it is impossible for them to imagine that all the endless sacrifices, with which for two thousand years our people has paid for the preservation of its spirit and its own form of life, are to have no result except to bring us at the present day to a condition of spiritual emptiness, the end of which will perhaps be a contemptible death. This constant feeling of distress necessarily impels these men to work for the freeing of our spirit and the products of our labour from alien dominion. Where there is a real want, be it physical or spiritual, there is a solid basis for a union of forces in joint work for the 107satisfaction of the common demand. And so it is the men who are really conscious of this want who form the only section specially fitted to support the Zionist movement, and to work for it unitedly, patiently, in an organized manner, until its goal is reached.

I am fully aware that not all who feel this need are as yet convinced that they must unite under the banner of Zionism. Many of them still believe in the possibility of freeing the Jewish spirit, and continuing its internal development, even without a national centre. But they will change their minds when that spiritual freedom in exile, for which they wait, is attained, and when they see the net result of their hoping to “sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.” In Western Europe and in America, where the desired freedom has already been granted, and its effect on our national life is obvious, the conviction is already spreading that external freedom, the removal of the heavy hand of oppression, is not in itself sufficient to free our innermost spirit from its moral bondage to the strange environment that surrounds us on all sides in our exile. And this conviction will inevitably spread in Eastern Europe also when the external chains are broken there. Our people will then be able, within certain limits, to live a national life, in accord with its own spirit, just so far as it wills to do so. But it will not be able so to will. The will itself does not depend on free choice. A man may wish to will, and yet be unable, because at that particular moment the necessary conditions are absent, without which the will cannot become an active force. So, too, in the case of a nation. There can be no active national will to live a distinctive spiritual life, even though permission be given under the hand and seal of the ruling 108power, where the individuals who compose the nation are surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere foreign to them, and breathe this atmosphere whether they will or no, without seeing in the whole world even a square yard of ground which their national spirit, and theirs alone, pervades, subject to no foreign overlord, and in which it creates with its own means of production enough spiritual wealth to satisfy the whole people.

I am aware also that the section that desires to free our national spirit, whether by means of a national centre in Palestine or without it, is not numerous, taken all together, at the present time. But this fact need not make us despair, as though in truth the death of our spirit were at hand, because it has no people to make it manifest in the world. The Hebrew spirit never sought its strength and power in numbers. “The Lord did not ... choose you because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people.” The God of this nation, when He saw it “turn quickly from the way,” did not fold up His Law and get Him gone, but said to the one man who remained faithful to Him: “Let Me alone ... that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.” It is a mistake to think that the national spirit is an abstract idea, which designates the sum of all the spiritual principles that manifest themselves in the life of the people in each generation, and that when this manifestation ceases it no longer exists. The national spirit is in fact a collective idea only in relation to the manner in which it came into being, as a result of the common life of a body of individuals closely connected with one another, and continuing through generations under certain conditions. But when it has once come into being, and 109has found root in men’s souls by virtue of a long history, then it becomes part of the psychology of the individual: its truth is vindicated in the individual, and does not depend at all on anything external to him. If I feel the Hebrew national spirit in my heart, and it gives a distinctive form to my inner life, then that spirit does exist in me, and its existence does not cease even if all the other Jews in my time no longer feel its existence in their own hearts. I assert, therefore, that if the majority of our people are unconsciously becoming more and more estranged from the national spirit, and if its children born in exile have made for themselves new gods like the gods of the peoples around them, and only a few remain faithful to our national idea in its historic form, and desire for it freedom and development: then these few are the heirs of our national possessions at the present time; it is they who hold the thread of history, and do not allow it to be broken. So long as there is a single Jew who holds the thread, we cannot tell what its end will be. Perhaps the conditions of life will change, and the small remnant will again become “a great nation.”

But how is it possible that the conditions of our life in exile should change in the manner necessary for the revival of the Jewish spirit? What power has a small party to strengthen and hasten this possibility? What security have we that the change, if it come about, will be firm and lasting?

These questions demand an answer not in words, but in deeds. Verbal answers we have given times without number. There is only one way, we have said, to change the conditions of our national life fundamentally, so that it shall become our life indeed, and not a passing 110shadow of the life of other people; and that way is the foundation of a centre for our national spirit “on its own native soil.” Further, we have promised more than once that this way of ours, like every new path, will be made and prepared by the few for the many, who will afterwards follow of their own accord. But when we came to turn our words into deeds, then it became clear that there was still chaos in the depths of our spirit, although the light of the idea played on the surface.

Whoever knows by experience how dear Palestine is still to every plain Jew, how his heart swells—sometimes even to the point of joyful tears—when he reads or hears of the revival of the Hebrew language among the children in Palestine, or of the success of the Hebrew colonies there—whoever knows this cannot deny that the actual work of building up a centre in Palestine, even before it approached its goal, could have had a wonderful influence on the spirit of the people in the lands of our exile. The truth is, that even now the majority of our people cherish their national inheritance, and desire its eternal preservation; but the bondage of galuth, material and spiritual, cramps the heart, and renders the national feeling and will incapable of becoming an effective force in action. And yet, if our work in Palestine had been such as to show clearly that there is really a prospect and a fair hope for the life of our spirit and our national possessions in the land of their birth; if the people had seen the foundations of the building laid by expert hands, one complete stone upon another, though the stones had been but small: then the people would have sought and found here a new source of life for its dormant national sentiment, and a new 111strength of will to protect more effectively its spiritual possessions in exile.

But as things are, how can we prove the correctness of our answer? What are the results of our twenty years and more of work in Palestine? With regard to material work, we have only unsuccessful attempts to show; and as for spiritual work, we cannot even show such attempts (except, perhaps, the school at Jaffa),^[66] for in fact scarcely anything has been done. Those who desired the “ingathering of the exiles” have laboured all these years, first of all in founding philanthropic colonies, and then in political talk; they have had neither the time nor the will to meddle in spiritual matters. Those, again, who desired the “revival of the spirit” have also dissipated all their time and their strength in spiritual work in the Diaspora; in all this time they have not created in Palestine one single spiritual product that could awake an echo in the nation’s heart. It is as though they had forgotten the first principle of their own faith, that the revival of the spirit in exile can come about only through the influence of a national centre in Palestine. They have, indeed, said a great deal about the need for founding universities and schools, and other such needs, the satisfaction of which is beyond their power at present. But they have not done that which was both necessary and possible.

Here, for example, is an attempt to found a small literary organ in Palestine. I ask myself: Why was this not done long ago? In the Diaspora a large number of literary plants have bloomed and faded during the Zionist epoch; they have borne fruit, and have left some good behind them, whether it was much or little. 112In Palestine, meanwhile, since the beginning of the movement there has not been published a single literary miscellany which has made its mark in our literature. Yet we did not feel that something was lacking. We constantly told the people that only in Palestine could our national spirit flourish and produce fruit after its kind; yet at the same time we were not ashamed to think that the people did not see in Palestine even a shadow of the fruit of its spirit, and that the little fruit that did grow was growing in other countries.

It is true that Palestine is still poor in spiritual forces generally, and in literary forces particularly; but that simply proves the truth of my contention. If we had always had a full and clear conception of the nature of our object, if we had always remembered that what we are seeking to build in Palestine is a refuge for our spirit, we could never have refrained from doing all that was possible to increase the spiritual wealth of Palestine, and to increase, little by little, its moral influence on the people. In that case we should undoubtedly have striven among other things to establish in Palestine a literary organ, an altar on which all our best national writers would have felt it their duty to offer their best, in order to win for it affection and honour in Jewry. An organ such as this, though it would have been at first an artificial creation, would certainly have uplifted the spirit and fostered literary talent in Palestine itself; perhaps also it would by now have become a true, natural literary centre for us, drawing sustenance from the forces which it had called to the land and developed there.

But it is as I said: in the human mind no idea springs from darkness into light at one bound. It was necessary for experience to teach us how slender is the thread on 113which hangs all our spiritual work outside Palestine, before we could be made to remember that in reality we had no need of such experience, since it only taught us that which was implied in our idea from the very first.

It is just at this moment that you come and tell us: “The time has come to begin planting our literature in the land of its birth.” Need I express my feelings when I read these words?

Yes, the time has come to begin planting, and planting not alone our literature, but also our spirit in all its aspects. All that now runs to waste in exile, voluntarily or involuntarily, must be gathered together and planted “on its own native soil,” and every man in whom the Jewish spirit lives is bound to help in this planting to the utmost of his power, because therein lies our life and our last hope.

“Romanticism,” our young men will say with a smile.

Let them smile—until they grow old enough to understand life as it is, and not as it appears through the glasses of a ready-made doctrine. Then they will understand that what they contemptuously call “romanticism” is the crown of life and the source of man’s superiority over the brute. They will understand, too, that this very anti-romantic doctrine has its attraction principally because of its romantic element—because it offers scope for devoted service in the cause of a distant ideal. But if ever there comes a day when that ideal is realised, and romanticism disappears entirely, then there will arise a new generation, which will curse that day for the hunger it has brought—a hunger not for bread, but for romanticism, for some ideal striving which can once more give scope for exaltation, for sacrifice, and so fill the emptiness of a life of peace and plenty.

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