As a Driven Leaf
by Milton Steinberg

List Price: $18.95
Our Price: $9.87
You Save: $9.08 (48%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.34 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of As a Driven Leaf

Book Review: "Wilt Thou harass a driven leaf?" -- Job 13:25
Summary: 4 Stars

Elisha's faith, already shaken by the influence of Greek and Roman culture, looses his faith in God after witnessing the accidental death of a child. Like Job, Elisha challenges God -- "Wilt Thou harass a driven leaf?" The dictum of the sages "it is not in our power to explain either the happiness of the wicked nor the sufferings of the righteous," was not an adequate answer to calm his distress. In his attempt to find axioms and a succession of propositions on which the doctrines of the Tradition might rest, Elisha opens a Pandora box in his mind.

Although Elisha's despair is honest, his persistent reverence and reliance on intellect turns his life into tragedy. He becomes aware that neither reality outside man, or feeling within him, is altogether logical, there is always a residue of the irrational never to be resolved into lucidity. Man's mind is an inadequate isntrument to achieve certainty. For all truths rests ultimately on some act of faith, geometry on axioms, and sciences on the assumptions of the objective existence and ordeliness of the world nature.

Published for the first time in 1939, this novel remains forever important in its dealing of a fundamental philosophical issue: the limitations of reason and the power of faith in the search of Truth.

United States Books

• Books > Subjects > Literature & Fiction