AZR refuses to weep, and, in the manner of the Hasidim recalling their righteous ones, chooses to rejoice:
"It is not to mourn him that I have come to recall him… and the Hasidic virtue of Aharon David Gordon was the joy that dwelt within him. Despite all his sufferings and pains… the joy never left him." AZR, "On the Anniversary of A. D. Gordon," "Kuntres," 1925; Project Ben-Yehuda.
Gordon's joy was not optimism about the future but joy in the present, and in creative labor he saw a purifying moral ideal:
"The precious, abandoned soil, the neglected soul, is purified through his labor… and Aharon David feels that he too is cleansed of every kind of exile, of all the dross of urban corruption, and he rises and is sanctified." Ibid.
And Gordon, in his view, was not merely a farmer but a "man of the book," who absorbed "from 'Chovot HaLevavot' and from Tagore, from Maimonides and from Tolstoy, from R. Yehuda HaLevi and from Goethe." AZR concludes: "Whoever loves Aharon David Gordon inherits something as well… and this something, who knows its worth!"
AZR experienced that very ethos with his own eyes, one Sabbath in Tel Mond, at a gathering of young workers (day laborers, "twenty grush a day") who sang and danced "Hasidic songs":
"And old age seemed to vanish from me; for a moment I returned to my youth, to the days of the good dreams I had dreamed of a Land of Israel worked by the hands of the children of Israel… You have no reason, O people of Israel, to be ashamed of your young ones!" AZR, "An Hour of Spiritual Ascent," "Davar," July 1932; Project Ben-Yehuda.
His attitude toward Gordon was not blind admiration. Already in 1911 AZR came out with "A Reply to Our Comrade R. A. D. Gordon," his essay "On Contradictions and Oppositions," against Gordon's letter "To Our Brothers the Workers." Gordon had argued that one must accept from others neither support, nor concern, nor even good thoughts ("You have no right to worry about us…"). AZR sharply rejected this:
"These words are truly terrible… First of all comes the unity of the nation… above them all rises the ideal of 'Israel, one nation,' and it is impossible to allow contradictions… to bring about division among brothers." AZR, "On Contradictions and Oppositions" ("HaPoel HaTzair," 1911), Ben-Yehuda read/43898.
He framed this against the backdrop of the Brenner affair (the Odessa Committee; see "AZR and Brenner") and the Maimonidean controversy during the Crusades, as examples of destructive internal schism, and he closes with his constant principle:
"A condition for the realization of Zionism is the cultivation of the sense of brotherhood in all the hearts of the children of Israel… only the sense of brotherhood, true and deep, will lessen the oppositions and straighten out the contradictions." Ibid. (Compare "We Are All Jews, Unity Against Divisions.")