tory, 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!_]

Who knows, but I am the last singer of Zion,
And you are the last who my songs understand.

These lines were penned on the threshold of the new era of the eighties.
The exponent of Jewish self-criticism lived to see not only the horrors
of the pogroms but also the misty dawn of the national movement, and he
could comfort himself with the conviction that he was destined to be the
singer for more than one generation.

The question "For whom do I labor?" was approached and solved in a
different way by another writer, whose genius expanded with the
increasing years of his long life. During the