The Ashkenazi Revolution

142proximate values. They conjured up a hoe, earth, a spot for settlement, andan economic industry of one sort or another. This revolution was bound upwith the revolution in everything that is related to time. Distant time, theinfinite future, and the semi-dreamy time, lost, for them, all of their valueand, in contrast, the stock of the present ascended greatly, for only in it arefound the physical and organizational constructs that the Labor movementhad formed and saw as its ultimate vision. This approach was a fatalmistake due to the fact that the value of the present is very small. Incontrast, the value of the future, the king of times, is great. It is great andmagnificent, it contains within it endless mystery and the unknown, and italso constitutes the scales that weigh all the deeds of the present. Manneeds bread, water and air. But more than this, he needs great expanses oftime, to infinity. He is obligated to look toward a distant point, to movetoward it and to measure his actions according to it.By giving up on the future, the Labor movement also gave up heaven as thefinal destination of its desires. For this great movement there is no heaven.A quorum of poor and lowly Jews, praying in a crumbling synagogue, has aheaven and they raise their eyes to the end of times. However this greatmovement that is called “the Labor movement”, has no heaven. All of itsassets are crowded and stuffed into the narrow strip of the present. The“society of workers”, or the administrative sector of the Hebrew settlementin the Land of Israel – this is the awe-inspiring cooperative creation that theLabor movement established in the British-ruled Land of Israel – existedentirely in the present. Moreover: On all sides it was surrounded by other,rival, parts of the mandatory present, first and foremost the force known asthe Arab population and the force known as British rule. Thisadministrative sector, chained with the chains of the present and pressuredfrom all sides by the hostile forces of the present, represented the vision ofthe entire movement, and it did not create for itself any object of yearningthat existed outside of it.In the struggle between the Labor movement and the Revisionists, theLabor movement had many advantages. But on one point the Revisionistshad the advantage. It had a heaven in the form of the goal whose name is