AZR opens with a historical meditation, seeing in Judaism "a unifying essence" whose nourishment comes from the Land of Israel. In his own day, by contrast, "Judaism is steadily crumbling… the people is splitting apart into small clusters, into 'kleyzlekh' [little prayer-circles], into fragments and splinters." The remedy is not spiritual alone but bodily and practical:
"The only way is to plant in the Land of Israel a community of Jews working in agriculture and earning their livelihood precisely by the toil of their own hands… Sound agricultural labor in the Land of Israel can also create Jewish cultural values, which will be the continuation of the great Judaism." AZR, "The Soul and the Body of Zionism" (Haftara, 1925), Ben-Yehuda read/28082.
The body (working the land) is the precondition of the soul (cultural continuity): "to restore the people to revival, to material revival through its bond with its soil in real agricultural labor, and thence to spiritual revival." Hence his sharp warning against blurring the purpose:
"A charity box for the hungry and the faltering is one matter, and Zionism is another matter. Let Zionism not forget for what purpose it was created." Ibid.
Here AZR diagnoses "the greatest evil": Hovevei Zion who came and settled and then "lost their way… were emptied of all content"; the ideal that once stood before them fell behind them. The bearer of the banner is "the working young person… with him, the ideal stands in the first rank." And his fuel is faith:
"But for this, faith is required. Faith in the justice of our aspirations — to find for our people a place of creative labor and human dignity in the land of our fathers, the land of our prophets, the land of our sages." AZR, "The Faith of Revival" (Collected Writings, 5695/1935), Ben-Yehuda read/50117.
And from where is such faith to be drawn in a skeptical generation? Here the spiritual and the national unite, by way of the sources:
"We have no prophets. But the books of the prophets remain to us; the books of the sages, mighty in faith, remain to us… Let us study them, let us immerse ourselves in them. Let us see how they loved the Land of Israel, how they gave their very souls for it." Ibid.
And to the scoffers who call this "an old, worn remedy," AZR replies with an image into which his whole doctrine is compressed:
"— Yes, old and ancient! But the sun too is old and ancient, and it alone gives light, warmth, and fruitfulness." Ibid., the closing of the essay.
The two essays are one face: the body = working the land and the toil of one's hands (see "AZR and the Labor Movement" and "Gordon and the Joy of Labor"); the soul = faith and cultural continuity drawn from the prophets and the sages. In AZR's eyes, a Zionism that has lost either one has lost itself. This is "a Zionism of spirit and action" in its purest form.