BOOKS: As A Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg

As a Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg

My rating: 1 of 5 stars




It was hard to write an adequate review.  I was even torn on how many stars to rate it.  On on hand, it was engrossing and hard to put down. The whole struggle to find a solid personal philosophical/spiritual foundation in the middle of conflicting cultures and beliefs was fascinating. However, the book's ending was profoundly disappointing to me. Elisha (the main character) and many of his friends and family all suffer tragically from his decision to explore Greek and Roman philosophy.

Were his explorations wrong? It's hard for me to think that. I read this book a few years ago and have been wrestling with this question ever since. Is it wrong to be driven to search out truth? And yet [New Thought!], maybe it could be. Maybe it is wrong if one is so focused on finding truth that he is blinded to the injustice and oppression going on around him.

Maybe that's the key to the book. Elisha originally turned away from Judaism because he witnessed an act of injustice. Then, after a lifetime of exploring pagan philosophies, he realized that many of the attractive things associated with those philosophies were worthless because they ignored key concepts of justice and mercy. The ideas and truths were more important and more beautiful to those cultures than people were. Maybe it isn't wrong to search out religious truths, but it is wrong to be so focused on the quest for ideas and truths that we ignore the social injustices going on around us.

That reminds me of something else. I read somewhere that we shouldn't search out unanswerable questions about God. Maybe that's because it uses up our precious, limited time that we could be using to study things that we can find answers to. Things that help us to "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly before our God".



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