The flower, says AZR, fulfills a mechanical function in the plant, and yet its beauty heralds something beyond the mechanical:
"The beautiful flower is the angel sent to us from on high. The beauty in it is the king's signet. And the person shackled to his earthly affairs looks at the flower, and his heart fills with hope." AZR, "Pathways" (Collected Writings, "Haftarah," 1928), Ben-Yehuda read/28066. And from here: "There is in the world an outward and an inward, bodies and souls, the finite and the infinite."
"As long as the lamp is not lit, it hoards the oil within itself… it stands alone in the darkness of its miserliness, separated from all that surrounds it. But when it is lit… it spreads light… and it rises in joy in flame. Like this lamp is the human being." Ibid. And the resolution: "Let it not worry overmuch about the oil, so long as there be light… but woe to it if it guards the oil and all around is darkness!"
The moral is social: whoever seeks to save only his own private soul "will lose the human content within him"; and setting private happiness up as the goal leads, in his sharp language, to a world of "a herd of cannibals, each devouring the flesh of his fellow." (Compare "We Are All Jews" and "AZR and the Labor Movement.")
How does one acquire love and beauty and purity? His answer is surprising: through suffering, "the hard coin with which we pay for all that is good, beautiful, and sublime… and we do not wish to be beggars… we wish to pay for everything." And the power of will is depicted in the figure of the child learning to walk (the same image from "R. Leib the Melamed"):
"Look, O man, at the child. How he strives to rise to his feet… falls and rises, falls and rises… he knows no despair." Ibid.
And the climax, the human being as a partner of the Creator, and the closing prayer:
"The Lord renews each day, continually, the work of creation… the human being too… has in him something of the measure of his Maker: he too seeks to create. The labor of the creating person is by its nature a labor of joy… Grant us… to take part with You in the work of creation… Plant, we pray, within us the desire to live full lives, a life of honest labor, a life of love and fellowship." Ibid., "Prayer" (chapter 12). Honest labor as holiness and joy as the service of God, the heart of AZR's synthesis (see "Gordon and the Joy of Labor").
Beside the lyric side stands a polemical one. AZR contrasts two types. In the Diaspora, the intelligentsia who used their education in order to flee from the people:
"Of course, all those fortunate ones distanced themselves from their people… became Russians… The intellectual force was squandered in vain, brought no benefit to the people of Israel." AZR, "The Intelligentsia and the People," "Davar," Av 1933, Ben-Yehuda read/44042. (As an example: Orshansky, who wrote "What have I to do with some… Jewish shopkeeper in Vilna?" and converted and became a professor in St. Petersburg.)
And facing him, the Hebrew intellectual in the Land, who lives within his people, who "from the school bench volunteer straight into honest and creative labor":
"Into the hearts of such intellectuals the poison of envy and fraternal hatred will not enter, for it is not for power that they aim… they went out to their brethren to look upon their burdens… whoever has much must give much." Ibid.
In a "Kuntres" from 1920, AZR shatters the "inverted logic" of those who justify parasitism in the building of the Land: "Socrates lived in the days of the enslavement of slaves… and therefore slavery has a right to exist… In exile there arose wonderful idealists, and therefore exile has a right to exist." His answer, that the good grew despite the rot, out of "the divine spark":
"Despite the corrupt environment, a few arise, people of soul, and by their moral influence they dig and dig beneath the rotten foundation of their time, until it falls of itself… There is no right of existence for the enslavement of peasants, no right of existence for brokerage, and no right of existence for exile." AZR, "Masters and Slaves" (Kuntres, Elul 1920), Ben-Yehuda read/43905.
And his call to the merchants and brokers: "Let them cast away their idols, their contemptible livelihoods, and let them too join the camp of the honest laborers." (The divine spark digging beneath the rotten foundation, that same "revolutionary" God from "Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees".)
And perhaps the most exposed of all: "Ne'ilah," "the confessional reflections of Saria the writer" (AZR's literary alter ego), a confession-poem of the Day of Atonement. Saria confesses that he sought "freedom" toward other gods, and arrived at boredom, at solitude, and at the mocking Satan:
"A prophet of freedom am I, liberated and liberating… happy I was not… and bitterest of all is the solitude… A band of cannibals are they all… and in the dimness of the night I saw Satan standing at my left… and calling: Behold the liberated one!… There is no other way but to take my own life." AZR, "Ne'ilah" ("Haftarah," 1928), Ben-Yehuda read/28089.
But on the brink of annihilation comes the gentle voice: "Return, my beloved… we have not grown distant from one another and we have not parted. We are bound in cords of eternal love." This is the redemptive reversal of Acosta, the same despair (freedom, solitude, Satan, the brink of ruin), but here the return triumphs. Thus "Ne'ilah" completes a trilogy: Acosta surrenders, Abraham triumphs in faith, and Saria returns.
A reflection in an entirely different key, AZR's response to a violent clash in Haifa (1921), in which an Arab child was killed and Jews and Arabs were wounded. He asks a "naive question": why was the blood shed, and to whose benefit? In his view there is no real cause, "the Arab laborers have not become impoverished since the Jews began to return… to build," and he attributes it to incitement and money:
"The hands of cultured European men are in the middle… there is apparently someone pouring out money to incite the Arab masses. Who is it that gives money for such purposes?… Let them hasten to root out the evil from the midst of the land." AZR, "On the Instigators" (Kuntres, 1921), Ben-Yehuda read/43909.
A short, resolute response to the events of November 1921 in Jerusalem, not the question "who incited," but a resolve to stand fast and build:
"The priests did not abandon the altar on the day the House of God was burned, even when the flame seized it. And for us the whole Land is an altar, all of it the Holy of Holies. Let us be strong and continue our work until our last breath. We, schooled by pogroms, are not frightened by tumult, and from our altar of life we shall not descend." AZR, "The Straight Path" (Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan 1922; with the events of November 2 in Jerusalem), Ben-Yehuda read/43869.
And here AZR's crimson thread is fully revealed. Turning to the Working Youth, whose situation is hard and whose labor dulls the mind, he refuses to rub salt in the wound, and calls out: "No despair!" The individual is "a floating grain of dust," but those who unite "will work wonders." And the closing binds it all together:
"Satan shows the short road, despair and revulsion at life, and the God of Israel calls out and says: And choose life!" AZR, "And Choose Life!" (Collected Writings III), Ben-Yehuda read/50110.
This is that very same Satan, from "The Diary of Uriel Acosta," from "Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees," and from "Ne'ilah": the one who shows the "short road" of despair and ruin. Here AZR gives him his explicit name, and the simple answer: and choose life.