On June 9th, 1856, Zionist leader Aaron David Gordon, more commonly known as A. D. Gordon, was born in Troyanov, Ukraine, to Jewish parents who originally went by the name ‘Guenzberg.’ For 20 years, Gordon and his wife oversaw a large portion of farming land; when the contract for the land ended, Gordon was left without a job.An unemployed 47-year-old Gordon then decided to move to Ottoman-occupied Palestine, participating in the Second Aliyah. He was one of 35,000 Jews immigrating to Israel at the time; among them were a majority of Eastern Europeans, mainly from Russia and Yemen. In Petah Tikvah, Gordon started working as an agricultural laborer despite his senior age, at a time when most migrants were exhausted from their age and family responsibilities. Despite the challenges presented, they made the journey more to escape from a life of poverty and persecution than for a Zionist ideology.Unlike many during the Second Aliyah, Gordon was religious and not a socialist. He believed in the value of labor and equality but was opposed to Marx’s ideas that class disparity was the primary lens through which we should view the world. For Gordon, one of the primary problems of the Second Aliyah was the lack of observance of ritual and tradition. He sought to rectify this by putting forth work in nature as a redemptive experience for the Jewish people. He called it the “religion of labor” and was a direct inspiration for the founders of Kibbutz Degania, the first of Israel’s kibbutzim. The idea of the kibbutz and the “religion of labor” took hold and became a staple of the resettlement of Jewish populations in the Land of Israel. Agriculture, irrigation, and the belief system turned deserts and malarial swamps into farmland. Gordon passed away in Mandatory Palestine on February 22, 1922, at the age of 65. For Gordon, Zionism was “the repair of human nature and, ultimately, of universal nature.” His vision lives on today through the work of many organizations, such as Gordonia, a Zionist youth movement created in Poland after his passing, and the Israeli Labor Party.