the death of the latter he is said to have spread his mantle over his friend's grave. Thereupon, according to a legend, a pillar of smoke arose from it, and Meir, paraphrasing Ruth 3:13, exclaimed, "Rest here in the night; in the dawn of happiness the God of mercy will deliver thee; if not, I will be thy redeemer". The same aggadah adds that at the death of Meir smoke ceased to issue from Elisha's grave. Modern cultural references to Elisha Jacob Gordin's play Elisha Ben Abuyah Jacob Gordin wrote a Yiddish play, Elisha Ben Abuyah (1906); it was performed unsuccessfully in New York City during Gordin's lifetime, and more successfully in numerous productions after his death; the title role was written for Jacob Adler, the only actor ever to play it. In the 1911 production after Gordin's death, the fallen woman Beata was played by Adler's wife Sara, Ben Abuyah's faithful friend Toivye Avyoini was played by Sigmund Mogulesko, and his daughter (who, in the play, runs away with a Roman soldier) by the Adlers' daughter Frances; in some of the last performances of the play, toward the end of Jacob Adler's career, the daughter was played by Frances younger, and eventually more famous, sister Stella. Gordin's Ben Abuyah is clearly a surrogate for Gordin himself, and to some extent for Adler: an unbeliever, but one who thinks of himself, unalterably, as a Jew, and who rejects Christianity even more firmly than Judaism, a man who behaves ethically and who dies haunted by a vision of "terrible Jewish suffering", condemned by the rabbis generally, but lauded as a great Jew by his disciple Rabbi Meir. Milton Steinberg's novel, As A Driven Leaf Conservative Rabbi Milton Steinberg fictionalized the life of Elisha ben Abuyah in his controversial 1939 novel, As A Driven Leaf. Steinberg's novel wrestles with the 2nd century Jewish struggle to reconcile Rabbinic Judaism both culturally and philosophically with Greek Hellenistic society. In Elisha's struggle, Steinberg speculates about questions and events that may have driven such a man to apostasy, and addresses questions of Jewish self-determination in the Roman Empire, the Bar Kochba Revolt (132-135), and above all the interdependence of reason and faith. Although the novel draws on Talmudic tradition to create the framework for Elisha's life, Steinberg himself wrote that his novel "springs from historical data without any effort at rigid conformity or literal confinement to