As a Driven Leaf

The practicing rabbi and historian Milton Steinberg wrote many books throughout his career, but only one of them was a piece of fiction: the novel As a Driven Leaf, published in 1939. Taking a small side character from the Talmud – the long, complex discussion of the Torah by generations of rabbis through history – Steinberg imagines the rich inner life of a man attempting to somehow connect his Judaism with his search for scientific and philosophical truth. By setting his novel in the 2nd century C.E., Steinberg grounds his writing in well-researched historical details that help propel our understanding of the conflict between the Jewish and Greek scholarship of that time – and of the challenge of reconciling belief and science up to the modern day.

The novel’s title comes from a passage in the Bible’s Book of Job, where Job incredulously wonders why God has decided to torment a being as insignificant as him, asking, “Wilt Thou harass a driven leaf?” In this case, our “driven leaf” is the novel’s protagonist, Elisha ben Abuyah, who is primarily known in the Talmud as the emblem of apostasy, a man who is renamed Akher (“Someone Else”) after he rejects Judaism. The novel examines what would have happened to compel Elisha to renounce everything he has believed in.

The novel is set in Palestine about a century after Christ, and still under Roman rule. The events take place before and in the aftermath of the Jewish rebellion against their occupiers in the middle of the 2nd century, the Third Jewish-Roman War of 132 C.E. The uprising would be brutally put down, and Roman forces would decimate the Jewish community in Judea almost to the point of genocide.



Some thirty years before this war, Elisha is born in Palestine. His mother dies in childbirth, but he is raised by an attentive and loving father. The main philosophical division affecting the Jewish people at this time is whether to isolate their traditions from outside influence or to learn about and adopt some Hellenic (Greek) culture and ways of life. Hellenists tend to be the more educated, higher class, more liberal of the two. Elisha’s father tends towards Hellenism, and so the boy’s education includes not just Judaism, but also Greek literature and science. While his friends are memorizing only the Torah, Elisha’s father hires a pagan tutor so the boy will also memorize Homer’s Iliad.

When Elisha is ten, his father dies suddenly, leaving all his money to his son, who now lives with the family of his Uncle Amman in the town of Migdal. Amman is diametrically opposed to Hellenist sympathies, and Elisha’s education is now transformed into a strict, traditional one. Still, Elisha is exceptionally bright, and soon grows learned enough to become a rabbi. Not only that, but his brilliance qualifies him to join the Sanhedrin, the prestigious rabbinical court that dispenses justice and formulates laws.

But being a first-hand witness to justice being done is also a front-row seat to injustice. After he is unable to prevent a good person from being treated unfairly – with dire consequences – Elisha starts questioning the foundation of his faith. One more incident of injustice is enough for him to renounce Judaism altogether, as he decides that there is no true Judge and no true God. At first he keeps these conclusions secret, but after he shares his atheism publicly, Elisha is excommunicated. Leaving behind his wife, the Sanhendrin, and everything he has ever known, Elisha moves to the huge metropolis of Antioch, in Greek-affiliated Syria, to pursue truth through science and rationality rather than belief.



In Antioch, Elisha begins working to find a way to use the unbiased principles of the scientific method to explain truth and belief. At first, the intellectual freedom of city life is exhilarating, as is his whirlwind romance with Manta, the mistress of a Roman soldier. But soon, Elisha starts to see flaws in this lifestyle as well. He can’t settle down with Manta like he would like to do, and he can’t discard his rabbinical training enough to enjoy the city’s hedonism like his friend Pappas.

Instead, Elisha finds a strain of philosophy that seems to combine his preference for a stricter lifestyle with his desire to find the truth of existence: Stoicism. Busying himself with scholarship full-time, Elisha finds himself going native – adopting Greek ways of thinking about the world, and even admiring the governing systems of the Romans, a shocking opinion, since the Jewish community has always viewed the Romans as unlawful occupiers. But there is no place for Elisha as a Stoic scholar either, and when he gets published, he is harassed by Marcus Tinnaeus Rufus, the Praetor of the province.

In 132, the simmering tensions of the Jewish independence movement’s resistance to Rome finally erupt into war. The Romans round up Jews in each province, not just in the rebelling Judea. Given the choice of either collaborating with the Romans or being killed, Elisha decides to do what he promised Manta when she was dying – save himself. He gives the Roman officials key pieces of information about Judaism that enable the Romans to use Jewish law against the Jewish people. What is striking about the way the story is told is that although Elisha’s actions here are clearly traitorous, Steinberg has aligned the reader so closely with his point of view that we are almost persuaded to read his betrayal as somehow for the greater good.



After the war, Elisha goes back to his books in order to try to continue his quest. But when he has to face several people from his previous life and explain his actions during the war, he realizes that his quest for truth may have been entirely misguided. He originally dismissed his faith because he saw acts of injustice. But after a lifetime of studying math, science, literature, and history, Elisha sees that philosophy that relies on strict rationalism is deeply flawed because it also completely ignores mercy and justice, valuing truth and beauty over humanity.

The novel ends with Elisha dying a depressed, miserable, disgraced man without a family or loved ones.