Abstract
ABSTRACT
Embracing Contradiction in the Writings of Aharon David Gordon and Yosef Haim Brenner
A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts
By Yair Bar-Zuri
This dissertation examines the notion of contradiction as a way of addressing the crisis of modernity and secularism in Jewish existence at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This term is viewed through the writings of Aharon David Gordon (1856-1922) and Yosef Haim Brenner (1881-1921), two of the main articulators of the Jewish movement that attempted to address this crisis—Zionism. The term contradiction in their writings indicates how they viewed the primary notion of human and Jewish existence. This term serves Gordon and Brenner to delineate forms of conflictual existence that do not seek resolution, but rather strive to utilize the contradictory tensions as a spiritual, and in some ways theological, drive in their perceptions of Zionism. In this research, I show the various appearances of the term contradiction in Gordon’s and Brenner’s thought and analyze how these appearances illuminate other terms such as theology, secularism, and nationalism. The centrality of Gordon and Brenner in Zionist thought, the way they influenced the development of Zionism as a movement of both philosophical thought and as political action, allows this dissertation to readdress the role of Zionism in expressing a spiritual and cultural question. Reading their writings through the prism of contradiction illustrates how they imagined the evolving Jewish settlement in Palestine.
While most scholarly work has viewed Gordon’s thought as harmonious in nature, I offer an analysis of Gordon’s philosophy as one that derives from his epistemology of human existence, which he understood to be conflictual in nature: an existence that is located between rational human ability and an unmediated connection to nature. What appears as the primary contradiction in human and Jewish existence, becomes in Gordon’s thought a theological idea: preserving the unresolvable contradiction of human existence emerges as a spiritual principle that guides the creation of Jewish identity in Eretz Israel. Such a form of existence shifts between the secularized character of the Zionist enterprise and the motivation to charge it with theological power.
In my explorations of Brenner’s writings, I suggest the ways in which we may understand the notion of contradiction as Brenner’s way of dealing with “the death of God.” Due to his harsh evaluation of Jewish existence, Brenner sought to anchor Jewish existence in “actuality” while also granting that actuality spiritual meaning. In fact, both Brenner’s harsh critique and vision are based on his own self-perception. As such, he utilizes the contradiction arising from his own existence to grant Jewish existence spiritual character after “the death of God.” Brenner’s perception of Jewish existence goes through a localized and rooted vision, which appears as a false ambition in which he remains torn between his belief in the possibility and justification of the territorially-rooted Zionist vision and his distrust of it. This conflictual character serves Brenner in formulating a form of unlocalized, in-organic existence and belonging to the land. The contradiction between the unrealized desire for locality and its impossibility characterizes Brenner’s writing in his attempt to address the question of Jewish existence in Palestine.
I end this project with an examination of nationalism as viewed from the paradigm of contradiction. I argue that Gordon and Brenner rejected the realization of Zionism in the form of a State or any other form claiming to resolve the conflictual character of human existence. As an alternative, they articulated an individual-based Zionism: they promote, each in his own unique manner, a form of nationalism that preserves the unresolvedness of human existence and grant this embedded tension a spiritual and theological quality deriving from the conflict.