Aaron David Gordon (1856-1922) was a Zionist ideologue who immigrated from Vilna, Lithuania to Palestine in 1904. He was a member of the pre-Zionist Lovers of Zion movement, which advocated revival of Jewish life in Eretz Israel, and formulated a philosophy of physical labor in which he expressed that only through work could Jews regain national renaissance and unity as a people. In this article, I will study a broad selection of Gordon's essays to show how Gordon establishes the ideal of working the land in the Yishuv by utilizing and reinforcing the Zionist movement's collective memory of the diaspora. By drawing on Zionist discourse that denies the diaspora, Gordon establishes a negative Jewish identity of the past in contrast to the positive identity he envisions for the Jewish people in the future. Gordon's ideal of working the land serves to emphasize the desolate existence of Jews in the diaspora, where, he argues, they were estranged from work and nature. Simultaneously, the image of weak diaspora Jews, consistent in Zionist rhetoric of the time, reinforced Gordon's vision of a strong Jewish people within the Yishuv. Coming from a religiously observant family, Gordon studied with the local rabbi, while simultaneously becoming proficient in several languages ​​and studied secular subjects such as the philosophy of Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, and Tolstoy (Schweid 1985:157). He remained Orthodox throughout his life, but during his years in Palestine he moved away from traditional Judaism to form his own philosophy on the connection between nation, nature and work. His views on the necessity of manual labor are based on his religious views and have therefore been called the "religion of work". Middle of paper......read, empowered and powerless. The most fundamental binary pair in identity creation is the distinction between “us” and “them.” The “other” is an essential component of the self-definition project of any group (Barth: 15). Most sociological studies on group identity and boundary creation deal with the relationship between two different groups during the same time period and from the same neighborhood. However, in Gordon's essays, the binary pair is between the "us" of the future and the "them" of the past; As we will see later in my analysis, Gordon establishes the Jewish diasporic past as an antithesis to the Jewish future within the Yishuv. Gordon builds his creation of Jewish diasporic identity on the discourse used within Zionism and establishes the future as being the opposite. Throughout my analysis, I will show how Gordon effectively establishes these two opposing identities..