FEAR AND TREMBLING by Soren Kierkegaard; read and reviewed by N.H.V.V.

The book is about Abraham's belief that God wishes for him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham's faith in God is tested to the maximum until he shows God that he's willing to obey him. His relationship to his son is put in jeopardy because Issac witnessed the drawing of the knife, which was held to his throat before the ram appeared and Abraham was urged by God to kill the ram instead of his son. It's a very demanding book with flashes of brilliance. It tends to go on and on. For example, "From Abraham we have no song of sorrow. As time went by he did not mournfully count the days, he did not cast suspicious glances at Sarah, fearing she was growing old..." This is a typical passage which asks for too much patience, promising very little. No direction is pointed to in order to hold one's attention. He makes his points eventually, "If there were no eternal consciousness in man, if at bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what then would life be but despair?" In short, one has to pay a price to arrive to such passages. The test of Abraham's faith is the ultimate existential experience of doubt and therefore the horror of nothingness and lack of meaning. Those Jews who lived through the worst of the holocaust or the Armenians who survived the massacres at the hands of the Turks or the Palestinians who were pushed out of their homes by the settlements must have faced the same excruciating questions about their own faith in God. Copyright 2011, by Nicholas Van Vactor, All Rights Reserved.