My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok is a novel that I have read seven or eight times, each time to my lasting benefit. More than the fiction of Saul Bellow, the memoirs of Elie Wiesel, or the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Potok's story taught me to understand why many Jews dread and fear Christianity. It was from Potok that I first learned of the shameful pogroms and of the suffering of the Jews in "Christian" cultures. It was also a window into the Hassidic culture of New York, giving me a view of its education, its worship, and its ethics. I can truly say the book has been a gift to me.
Reading it again this summer against the background of other Jewish literature, My Name Is Asher Lev has yet again given me a gift. It has helped me enter more deeply and sympathetically into the dilemma of the individual and the community. The book explores a profound and intriguing scenario: what if a visual artist of powerful and undeniable talent, like that of Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, or Amedeo Modigliani, was born into a Brooklyn Hassidic community? The character of Asher Lev is who he is because he has been born with a painter's eye. Asher is also who he is because he is a religious Jew and an only child whose father often must travel abroad for the community's Rebbe and whose mother, having suffered the loss of her brother, battles with debilitating fear that she will lose her husband or her son. Asher's painting will eventually wound his parents, as well as his small religious community, deeply.
He is torn between two traditions--that of the art world and that of Hassidic Judaism. The wounding comes not just because many Hassidic Jews distrust painting, or think it a frivolous activity at best, but because Asher must turn to the painting of nudes if he is to truly absorb the tradition of Western art, and worse, he must turn to the painting of crucifixions if he is to find a form of ultimate suffering to embody in his personal vision his mother's pain. This last act is one of utterly bewildering betrayal that ends the novel and the artist's coming of age.
Potok labels this experience "core-core culture confrontation," that is when the values of one's community come into conflict with those of the larger general culture. Both the uniqueness of the individual and the particularity of the community are woven into their "sense of identity":
(1) You learn early on in your life the stable values of your particular community.
(2) You learn early on in your life that your life makes sense; that it's important, it counts.
(3) You learn that human actions are meaningful. They resonate. One cannot act without in one way or another affecting.
(4) You learn early on in your life that action and value ought to be in harmony. You cannot have a viable sense of self worth if you value one thing and act contrary to what it is that you value. When this happens, a dichotomy or split in the self is established.
Finally it seems to me that fundamental to an awareness of the nature of a core of both a tradition and an individual in that tradition is (5) that the individual be made aware of what is right and what is wrong, as far as the community is concerned, and that the individual be able to choose between the two.
In My Name Is Asher Lev, Asher experiences confrontation in his identity because the art world would hold that individual expression and personal honesty are essential to art's greatness, while in Asher's community, one learns to channel one's self into given roles. But it is not just that Asher's community has no real place for his vocation, it is that the worldview underlying it cuts against their deepest values. The struggle for the young artist is in seeking a way between these rival polities.
Asher, after all, cannot entirely jettison his community. They are at the core of his art--its subject matter, its mythic power, and its raw emotion. And Potok the novelist is sure to offer us a vision of his community that is human and multi-dimensional. They try to listen, to understand his art, to account for him, and to find a place for him: "Everyone is listening," his mother tells him in response to his complaints, "There would be no problem if no one were listening to you, Asher" (111). Yet this vision of the young's artist's individuality must still wrestle with counter-vision of secular modernity. When Asher later explains that he is accountable to his community because "All Jews are responsible one for the other," his teacher Jacob Kahn responds, "As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it. Do you understand? An artist is responsible to his art. Anything else is propaganda" (218).
Is Kahn entirely correct, however? As a Christian, I would contend that there may be a third way forward. Jacques Maritain thinks that art comes from an internalized habit of work and reflection. The artist is a maker of art objects. The subjectivity, the imagination, and the act of confession in the true artist are all subsumed to the act of making the beautiful work. Much like people as moral beings learn a kind of ethical prudence, an inner sense of what a given situation calls for, so artists over time develop certain habits of seeing and working. A poet, for example, has to put in the time and work with language, metaphor, observation, etc. in order to develop a poetic craft. The poet’s subjectivity is meant to serve the work and not the reverse. Maritain stresses that the Christian who would make art should focus on the task at hand:
If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to "make Christian." [. . .] The entire soul of the artist reaches and rules his work, but it must reach and rule it only through the artistic habitus. Art tolerates no division here. It will not allow any foreign element, juxtaposing itself to it, to mingle, in the production of the work, its regulation with art’s own. Tame it, and it will do all that you want it to do. Use violence, and it will accomplish nothing.
The artist can only make what she has learned over time to practice. It has its own demands, concerns, and rules. These are only right and natural and should be respected. Indeed, trying to bypass these in the name of religion is only bound to failure. The same can be said of the other arts, too. Poet Rod Jellema would warn us against using the label "Christian poet" too lightly: "It invites a poet who is a Christian into a frame of mind in which, proud of his humility, he can knock the tough commitment to art as merely arty, shrug off the world’s expected indifference to his work as the price he must pay for his martyrdom, and isolate himself in mutual-admiration groups of like-minded poets."
The artist as maker is a humbler definition of vocation than that of the prophet or truth-creator, and I would contend that it is more Christian, and yes, more Jewish. Such a vision does not deny the talent or the genuine inspiration of the artistic process, but it reminds us that the artist in serving a tradition of art is nevertheless still serving the truth, and a truth found in more than an individual
Mitchell paints a very elaborate description of Asher's dilemma - to choose between ones community or remain 'true' to ones artistic goals. Difficult decisions are normally made after weighing the pros and the cons. The artist, actually being no different than any other individual, must also go through this same process in making such a difficult decision. One decision alone does not define an individual, nor should it be the cause a loss of identity or self worth. At such times, compromise and sacrifice can be noble methods to use. For self-assured individuals, the choice would be a simple one - the one that would do the best good. - Ronald Boykins
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