At the heart of his work stands the "Call" he wrote in 1905 and asked to circulate anonymously — "let it speak for itself." He aimed it not at the intellect but at feeling:
"In it I shall speak to the hearts of our young people and to their souls more than to their cold reason. For love and heroism, the fruit of strong feelings, always surpass cold reason, which is very often exceedingly short-sighted." Yosef Vitkin to M. Ussishkin (Kfar Tavor, 5665/1905), Ben-Yehuda read/17992.
The Call was intended as an educational force: "They must educate young people for us according to our wishes over time, if none exist now."
And this is how the Call sounded — one of the founding documents of the Second Aliyah:
"Awake, awake, young people of Israel, rise to the aid of the people! Our people is perishing, its land will soon slip away from us forever; hurry, hasten to its aid! Organize, take upon yourselves a firm discipline, a discipline unto life and death… Leave behind, forget everything that has been dear to you until now… and come to the work of the people!" Yosef Vitkin, "Kol Koreh" (Adar I 5665/1905), Ben-Yehuda read/6727.
At its core is a hard-nosed realism — "let us admit openly that we have done nothing, and therefore we have achieved nothing!" — and a demand for absolute devotion: "We must finally recognize that our ships have already been burned, that we have no escape and no refuge." And its closing: "Better upon the shield than without it!… Renew the days of the 'Biluim' with redoubled strength and vigor, for a little longer and we are lost."
Vitkin was no romantic. He examined at close range the first workers who arrived, and found that most were not prepared for the mission, apart from the Homel group (the first Poalei Zion workers):
"They came here under the influence of the moment, their heads muddled by a mass of doctrines they could not digest… For humble and quiet national work, slow work full of self-sacrifice, they were neither trained nor educated." Ibid., to Ussishkin. His conclusion: the associations must be organized and educated while still in the diaspora, "before they come here."
His letters unfold a wide-branching map of Second Aliyah connections. With Ussishkin he conducted a strategic correspondence — on the Call, on emigration, and on the defense of Metula (where, with surprising sharpness, he proposed settlement in place of military defense):
"Greater is the power of 30 families settling in a new place to Judaize the surroundings and give it security, than if many more families were added to the existing colony." Ibid., to Ussishkin (on Metula). He also proposed an economic information bureau, a library named for Maimonides in Tiberias, and the entry of young people into the Ottoman administration.
And to the Pukhachewsky family (Rishon LeZion) he wrote personal letters, lyrical and sharp-witted, that reveal his loneliness in Mescha:
"And here with me it is mud, mud, and more mud!… The street is empty of people, the mind empty of thoughts, and the heart, too, is hollow!… And this laughter of mine is a sigh, and it is mingled with tears…" Ibid., to the Pukhachewsky family (5665/1905).
In 1907, in Vienna (after surgery, and the death of his father), a prophetic vision arose in him — to travel to Russia and rouse the people:
"And at times I hear an inner voice calling to me, saying: Go and prophesy to this people, comfort it… Cast from its heart the fragments of its idols and build there an altar to the God of Israel… and roam the cities of Israel and you will find young souls, pure Hebrew souls, seeking God and not yet having found Him." Ibid., to Ussishkin (Vienna, 5668/1907).
But he refused to be a "meshulach" (a charity emissary): "I want to come before our masses not as an emissary from the Land of Israel, but as a man who has lived ten years in the Land of Israel… and has arrived at those convictions which he preaches." In an open letter to the Zionists of Vienna he attacked the "Zionism of pity" that neglects the education of the children.
AZR wrote the eulogy-introduction to "Selected Writings of Vitkin" (5672/1912), drawn to "the gentleness of his spirit." And from Vitkin's side: during the Brenner Affair (1911) he received a letter from AZR, A. Zioni (Vilkansky), and R. Binyamin, the three conveners of the writers' assembly, and replied with a complex position:
"I received the letter from AZR, A. Zioni, and R. Binyamin… I too think that articles like Brenner's are truly dangerous, but the proposal that came after the resolution is nothing but the fruit of foolish love." Ibid., to Y. Aharonovitch (5671/1911). Vitkin even signed the protest resolution (note in the Yad Ben-Zvi edition).
The edition's note observes that "both AZR and R. Binyamin were religious, observant men" — common ground with the spiritually minded Vitkin. See "Portraits of the Second Aliyah" and "AZR and Brenner, the Brenner Affair".
An alliance that could contain disagreement: here the depth of the alliance is revealed — Vitkin and AZR were allies who disagreed with each other about Brenner himself. Vitkin held that Brenner's articles were "truly dangerous" (and even wrote against them, "Hatred and Self-Adulation"), while AZR was Brenner's devoted friend and defender. And yet both stood together on the principle of freedom of expression — not out of agreement with Brenner but out of opposition to "schisms" and to the coercion of opinion (see "We Are All Jews"). Unity-within-disagreement, precisely AZR's doctrine.
His final years were hard: 13 years of devoted, unpaid teaching, and at their end a smear campaign against him in "HaOr" (the "Delilah" pamphlets, by a jealous fellow teacher). He described it with pain:
"A modest soldier of the people labors in the field of education for 13 years, work of utter self-sacrifice… and then comes an editorial board that carries the banner of the very idea for which this teacher gave his soul, and pours a bucket of slops over him. Can such a thing be?" Ibid., to Tsvi Hochberg (5671/1911). Vitkin died in 1912, still young.