"Saria the Scribe" had always thought R. Leib was "a tale… a fabrication," until, in the Land of Israel, he met a farmer whose identity becomes clear:
"– Why, this is R. Leib the Melamed, the partner of R. Mendele the Bookseller… He sought to settle in the Land of Israel, and with unparalleled energy and stubbornness he at last reached his goal, and he is now a landholding farmer." AZR, "On the Road of Revival: R. Leib the Melamed," Ben-Yehuda read/43897.
R. Leib's willpower is the heart of the story: "The stumbling stones are invisible to me… from afar the goal shines for me like a glittering star and draws me on, and I hurry and run, fall and rise, fall and rise."
R. Leib insists on speaking Hebrew only, and has even changed his name from "Leib" to "Aryeh":
"We must purge the jargon from our midst, from every corner, like leaven on Passover eve… The first condition for a people's existence is its language. So long as we have a language of our own, we are a people; and if not — we are worse off than gypsies." Ibid. And to those who mocked his broken Hebrew: "We were already commanded in the Shulchan Arukh, section 1, 'and let him not be ashamed before those who mock him.'" (See "For Hebrew.")
The account of the passage from groping "like the blind" to farming closes with a prayer R. Leib offers over the hoe, with the core of AZR's teaching upon it:
"'Give me strength to work the treasured land which You chose for a treasured people… that they may not say we are idlers'… And behold, a wonder: the more I went on working, the lighter the work felt. The hoe already obeyed me, as if rising of its own accord." Ibid.
And of the young laborers, in the language of the Yom Kippur liturgy: "All of them beloved, all of them pure, all of them heroes, and all of them holy!"
In the second part, a letter from "R. Leib" to Saria preserves his reaction to the Balfour Declaration, which reached him while at Degania:
"The Balfour Declaration found me in Degania. It stunned me!… After a long, long exile, black upon black, of thousands of years, a mighty kingdom came and proclaimed: the Land of Israel for the people of Israel!" Ibid., "A Letter from R. Leib the Melamed to Saria the Scribe."
And from here to the mission: the vocation is "to realize in practice what our prophets taught us… to be a light unto the nations not only 'in the book' but also in deed," on the foundation of self-labor and morality. And his call: "We can be either superior to all the peoples or lower than all the peoples, but not be like all the peoples."
This is not historical testimony but a tendentious story: AZR takes a famous literary figure of failure (Mendele's R. Leib) and turns him into a symbol of triumph — thereby packing into a single fiction all his core principles: willpower, zeal for Hebrew, the holiness of labor, and the national moral mission. It should be read as engaged art, not as documentation.