To live by soulless rites hast thou been taught,
    To swim against life, and the lifeless letter to keep;
    To be dead upon earth, and in heaven alive,
    To dream while awake, and to speak while asleep.

During the seventies, Gordon joined the ranks of the official agents of enlightenment.  He removed to St. Petersburg, and became secretary of the Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment.  The new Hebrew periodical ha-Shahar [1] published several of his “contemporary epics” in which he vented his wrath against petrified Rabbinism.  He portrays the misery of a Jewish woman who is condemned to enter married life at the bidding of the marriage-broker, without love and without happiness, or he describes the tragedy of another woman whose future is wrecked by a “Dot over the i.” [2] He lashes furiously the orthodox spiders, the official leaders of the community, who catch the young pioneers of enlightenment in the meshes of Kabal authority, backed by police force.  Climbing higher upon the ladder of history, the poet registers his protest against the predominance of the spiritual over the worldly element in the whole evolution of Judaism.  He assails the prophet Jeremiah who in beleaguered Jerusalem preaches submission to the Babylonians and strict obedience to the Law:  the prophet, dressed up in the garb of a contemporary orthodox rabbi, was to be exhibited as a terrifying incarnation of the soulless formula “Law above Life.” [3]

[Footnote 1:  See p. 218.]

[Footnote 2:  The title of a famous poem by Gordon, Kotzo shel Yod, literally “the tittle of the Yod” the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet.  The poem in question pictures the tragedy of a woman who remained unhappy the rest of her life because the Hebrew bill of divorce which she had obtained from her husband was declared void on account of a trifling error in spelling.]

[Footnote 3:  The author alludes to Gordon’s poem “Tzidkiyyahu be-bet hapekuddot” ("Zedekiah in Prison"), in which the defeated and blinded Judean ruler (see Jer. 52. 11) bitterly complains of the evil effects of the prophetic doctrine.]

The implication is obvious:  the power of orthodoxy must be broken and Jewish life must be secularized.  But while unmasking the old, Gordon could not fail to perceive the sore spots in the new, “enlightened” generation.  He saw the flight of the educated youth from the Jewish camp, its ever-growing estrangement from the national tongue in which the poet uttered his songs, and a cry of anguish burst from his lips:  “For Whom Do I Labor?” [1] It seemed to him that the rising generation, detached from the fountain-head of Jewish culture, would no more be able to read the “Songs of Zion,” and that the poet’s rhymes were limited in their appeal to the last handful of the worshippers of the Hebrew Muse: 

[Footnote 1:  Title of a poem by Gordon, Lemi ani ’amel!]