In the beginning there were some impassioned souls who lifted up their eyes to the reform of the world. The blazing faith of religious men, the sons and grandsons of religious men, generations upon generations of passion and persistence. These sons had lost their religious faith and abandoned the religious commandments, but they had not given up their devotion and drive and their thirst for the absolute: to be attached to a single, great, final and decisive truth, that found detailed expression in innumerable rules and regulations, both great and small, in everyday life. They had ceased to be religious according to the religious law, but in a new way they continued to be pious and even messianic. And when they came to the Land of Israel and set up the first kibbutzim, their ideals were like a fire in their bones.

They found a hard and alien land, very remote from the ‘land our fathers loved’ portrayed in sentimental songs, the opposite of the ‘land of eternal springtime’ of which Bialik's bird sang, a parched contrast with the fairytale land they had imagined from the stories of their childhood in the snow-bound shtetl, that land of sunshine, of almonds and raisins, of the seven biblical species, the land of Mapu's ‘Love of Zion’ and the verses of the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) movement, of the olivewood camels of the Bezalel Art School and the pictures of the Jewish National Fund.

They came to a bare and baring land, where the harsh climate and the grinding toil and the loneliness of the whispering nights stripped a man naked of every possible disguise.