His Work · Social Thought · AZR and the Labor Movement

AZR and the Labor Movement

"The grandfather of the Working Youth" · In his own voice: the foundation of labor, the worker's dignity, and a call for unity

In his final years AZR was a central moral voice of the labor movement in the Land of Israel, "the grandfather of the Working Youth" (Zalman Shazar's epithet; see "Criticism and Reception"). Beyond symbolic sympathy, he wrote substantive social thought. This document presents his teaching from primary sources, from two key moments: his greeting to the founding conference of "Ahdut HaAvoda" (1919) and his article "To the Army of Workers" (1920). Project Ben-Yehuda · public domain

A A Greeting for the Founding of "Ahdut HaAvoda" (5679/1919)

To the party's founding conference (Jaffa, Adar 5679) AZR sent a letter of greeting; he did not attend owing to his health. At its heart lies the view that self-performed agricultural labor is the foundation of the revival, and that everything else, without it, is empty:

"I see no hope for the revival of our people in our land except in self-performed agricultural labor, which will give the workers the possibility of living whole lives, healthy in body and soul." AZR, "Letter of Greeting to the Founding Conference of Ahdut HaAvoda," 22 Adar I 5679 (1919), Jaffa.

"All the other things — faith and Torah, inquiry and poetry, craft and art, literature and education — are fine things… but so long as it [the foundation] is absent, they too are disembodied souls hovering in the air, with no hold on life. Self-performed labor is the beginning of morality, and the act of exploitation is the beginning of sin." Ibid.

The distinctive nuance: the worker's dignity, not asceticism

Against the ethos of sacrifice and self-denial, AZR demands precisely the worker's dignity and humane conditions, and warns against false idealism:

"The Hebrew worker need not be manure for the coming revival — going naked and barefoot, suffering hunger, and bedding down in cowsheds — but should see his world in his own lifetime… Beware of Satan when he clothes himself in the garb of idealism…" Ibid.

B "To the Army of Workers" (Kuntres, 5680/1920)

A year later, an impassioned call for the unity of the "army of workers," containing the phrase that embodies his epithet:

"The foundation of the revival of our people and our land is the army of workers. Without it all is fleeting vanity… When I hear the voice of some hundreds of young people… my old heart begins to beat with the pulse of youth, and before my dimming eyes appears the splendor of the dawn of redemption…" AZR, "To the Army of Workers," Kuntres, Adar 5680 (1920).

"The army of workers must be united together in a bond of inner brotherhood and in a strong federation. The divisions and their rationales must be annulled. This is the principle of principles… Do not quarrel, brothers, along the way!" Ibid. (Against the background of the founding of the Histadrut and the disputes among the factions, 1920.)

AZR's synthesis: a religiously observant Jew, a vegetarian and Tolstoyan (see "Vegetarianism"), became a moral voice of the secular labor movement — joining the ethos of self-performed labor with a humanist demand for the dignity of the working person, and calling for unity. Thus the title "the grandfather of the Working Youth" becomes clear not as an anecdote but as an articulated ideological position. (See also "The Man, In Depth" and "Criticism and Reception.")

C The Struggle Against the Communist Faction in the Working Youth

Being "the grandfather of the Working Youth" was not merely gentle grandfatherliness: AZR fought for the movement's Zionist soul. He came out against the influence of the "Fraktzia" (the Communist faction) and other non-Zionist currents, which sought to bind the Working Youth to Communism and the Bolshevik revolution and to empty it of its Jewish-national aims.

This stance is fully consistent with his lifelong principles — the unity of the nation, and honest labor as something sacred (see "AZR, Gordon, and the Joy of Labor" and "We Are All Jews") — and with his statements that the existence of the Hebrew people is inconceivable without religion, and his hope to see religious people within the labor movement. Tidhar I/254 and his writings; details of the "Fraktzia": secondary source

D In His Home: AZR Officiates at the Wedding of Ben-Zvi and Yanait

On December 31, 1918, AZR conducted the marriage ceremony (kiddushin) of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, later the second President of the State, and his wife Rachel Yanait. The huppah was held in the home of AZR — Ben-Zvi's fellow townsman from Poltava and his close friend — in the presence of only about ten comrades, according to the law of Moses and Israel. Two primary sources document this.

"Present at the meeting was Avner's close friend, the elderly writer Alexander Ziskind Rabinovitz (AZR), also a Poltava man, and it was he who performed the kiddushin."Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, Anu Olim: Chapters of a Life, p. 517. ("Avner" was Ben-Zvi's literary pen name.) primary source · memoirs

"The wedding was held at the home of Ben-Zvi's fellow townsman, Alexander Ziskind Rabinovitz… Ten comrades were present, and the ceremony was conducted according to the law of Moses and Israel, with kiddushin, a ketubah, and all the rest."From David Ben-Gurion's letter to Paula, two days after the event. primary source · contemporary letter

A chronological distinction: According to Rachel Yanait's memoirs, that morning there was "a decisive meeting of the party's central committee in preparation for the founding conference of 'Ahdut HaAvoda,'" and Ben-Gurion calls it "a meeting of the party's central committee." In other words, this was a preparatory meeting of the center, not the formal founding conference (which convened about two months later). Sources that link the wedding directly to the "founding conference" conflate two adjacent events.

This detail ties together several threads across the site: Ben-Zvi was AZR's pupil in his childhood (see "AZR the Educator" and "Portraits: Borochov, Ben-Zvi, and Vitkin"); both belonged to the nationalist Poltava circle; and here it is the religious AZR, "the grandfather of the Working Youth," who leads the secular workers' leader to the huppah according to the law of Moses and Israel.