Land and Desire in Early Zionism by Neumann Boaz;

Author:Neumann, Boaz;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandeis University Press

The halutzim took pleasure in the new existential experience of the rebirth of their organs and the currents that coursed through their bodies. They exulted in the flow of their sweat. “When I walked behind Tanhum [Tanpilov?], hoeing the first cypress-lined avenue,” testified a member of Degania, “and the calluses on my hand burst and sweat blinded me—I was happy.”87 They reveled in the sense of their blood flowing. Golda Meyerson of Merhavia wrote that after a day of labor, a person is tired, exhausted. But it is a pleasant exhaustion: “Your body warms up, your blood flows through your veins like a brook, and you feel that you have created something in your day of work.”88 A woman at Degania was given her first opportunity to harvest a field with a scythe. “I felt my heart pounding within me,” she recounted, “and blood flowing.”89 The body's fatigue after a day's labor was likened by one halutz to “sparkling wine.”90

Labor disciplined the organs to work together naturally. Berl Katznelson meant precisely this when he spoke of “manual skill”—the literal translation of his Hebrew idiom, tevunat kapayyim, is “wisdom of the hands.”91 He wrote to his sister trying to persuade her to accept any form of labor, to accustom herself to it, to know it. Labor, he said, was a precondition for the body's proper functioning. It was essential for the vitality of the body, soul, and organs. It ensured that one's eyes would not go blind, one's hands not grow clumsy, one's brain not doze, one's body not become “a lump of wax.” It was particularly essential in the Land of Israel, where one lived a life of labor on the soil, in a place where “speech is [not] the most important thing, but rather heroism and capability, the capability of understanding a thing. ‘Wisdom of the hands’ is what the ancient Hebrews called it.”92 In a later letter, Katznelson described his difficult journey as a laborer in the Land. For him labor required mobilizing body, spirit, consciousness, and soul: “Not only have my hands not worked as they should, but my brain has not grasped the work. My eye has not seen it and I have not understood what is around me. I lack ‘wisdom of the hands.’”93

As the pioneers’ bodies were shaped through their organs, their senses awakened. As we saw, defective senses were characteristic of the exilic-body-without-organs, and the Land the halutzim encountered upon arrival also lacked organs. A land-without-organs cannot be perceived because there is nothing to perceive. As one pioneer noted, when it came to the Land's plant life, most of the new settlers “had eyes that did not see.”94 In channeling their desire into the Land, the halutzim constituted themselves as bodies capable of perceiving the Land, while simultaneously creating the Land as an object of their senses. Yitzhak Pelah of Kiryat Anavim testified that in working outdoors and building the Land, the pioneer eye learned to see.95 Tzvi Nadav noted that, day by day, his eyes were learning to distinguish wheat from barley while the crops were still sprouting.

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