AZR arrived with his family (eight persons, two hundred rubles), and immediately joined the circle of teachers:
"My teacher colleagues brought me to their 'autonomia'… in Neve Shalom, opposite the Chabad study house. There all the teachers of the girls' school had found lodgings, and for me too they found a room there. The solidarity among the teachers was strong then… most of them were of the loyal guard of 'Bnei Moshe'." AZR, "From the First Days in the Land", Ben-Yehuda read/44002. (On "Bnei Moshe" see "With Hovevei Zion".)
His livelihood was partly secured — 25 rubles a month from A. L. Levinsky for his work on "The History of Hebrew Literature" — but it was not enough.
At Hanukkah he went up to Jerusalem and lectured at the Lämel School — of all subjects, on "the parameters of prophecy" (see "Heirs of Prophecy"); and he felt the power of the moment:
"A tremor passed through my whole body as I mounted the platform to lecture. Am I not in Jerusalem, in the place where the prophets prophesied, where the sages of the Mishnah expounded, Hillel the Elder and R. Yochanan ben Zakkai… It is not my own words I speak, but what they said; from their source I draw." Ibid.
A few months later he found steady work as librarian of the "Sha'arei Zion" library (70 francs a month), the Hebrew cultural institution of Jaffa, and rejoiced in it wholeheartedly. And his humility: when the caretaker was careless about cleanliness, "having no choice, I would sweep the rooms myself. There is nothing to be ashamed of."
From his encounter with the workers of the Land was born the conviction that would accompany him all his life, and would make him "the grandfather of the Working Youth":
"I quickly became acquainted with the workers in the Land of Israel, and from then on the idea entered my heart, that the workers — those who labor and earn their bread by the very toil of their hands — are the builders of the Land and of the people. Without them there is no foundation for any enterprise or for any of our hopes." Ibid. (See "AZR and the Labor Movement".)
And not conviction alone but deed: "And when the decree was issued against the workers in Petah Tikva, R. Yechezkel Danin (Duchovolsky) and I tried to intercede to have the decree annulled." Practical activity
From day one, AZR's Zionism was practical: a teacher in the Bnei Moshe circle, a lecturer (the parameters of prophecy, in Jerusalem), a librarian at Sha'arei Zion, and an advocate for the workers, out of the conviction that "the workers… are the builders of the Land and of the people". Here lies the seed of "the grandfather of the Working Youth".