What is faith? How do you know the truth of what you believe in? What if you have doubts? How do you find the truth? And, at what costs? These are some of the spiraling questions you will deal with when reading about Elisha.

You love Elisha, and so you follow him through the trials in which he engages. This book answered a lot of my own questions about the faith versus reason "conversation" with which most of us are still struggling. ( )

Elisha ben Avuyah, ca. 70-ca. 135 Fiction.

A marvelous tale of historical fiction. The book is about Elisha ben Avuyah, the only Talmudic sage to abandon Judaism and become a heretic. Because of the suffering of innocents, Elisha no longer can bring himself to base his beliefs in tradition. He leaves Palestine for Antioch and for the life of a scholar, in search of a faith based on reason rather than assumption. It ends rather depressingly but is a very good book, nonetheless. Recommended.

Experiments in Reading ( )

This is historical fiction of the life of Elisha ben Avuyah. An interesting but difficult read, I found it getting intollerably pedantic towards the end. The author tends to belabor his point. ( )

This is a historical-fiction account of the rabbinic community immediately after the destruction of the Second Temple. It takes the rabbis from the Talmud and puts them to life to offer a "midrash" of how the Tannaitic period brought about the Mishnah. ( )