In My Name Is Asher Lev, Asher, a young Hasidic Jew (part of the fictionalized Ladover sect) grows up with a fervent belief in the Jewish obligation to bring about holiness in the world. In fact, he and his community believe that there are two “sides” in the world—those holy things pertaining to religious, Torah-observant Jews, and those things that belong to the “Other,” hence “demonic,” side that opposes holiness. This strict division between divinity and perceived demonic influences causes confusion for Asher as he wrestles with his artistic gift and calling throughout his life. By showing how Asher finally comes to terms with this dichotomy, Chaim Potok argues that the distinction between the demonic and the divine is more ambiguous than human categories allow for, and that this ambiguity often generates strife for communities.
Asher grows up believing that Jews must constantly oppose all that comes from the “Other Side,” and he fears that his unsought artistic gift might originate there and is therefore demonic in nature. One day Asher’s father, Aryeh, tells his young son: “Asher, you have a gift. I do not know if it is a gift from the Ribbono Shel Olom or from the Other Side. If it is from the Other Side, then it is foolishness, dangerous foolishness, for it will take you away from Torah and from your people and lead you to think only of yourself.” His father’s words create a lingering fear that Asher will inevitably undermine his own community’s efforts at holiness, by virtue of his potentially demonic gift. Later, Asher asks God, “If You don’t want me to use the gift, why did You give it to me? Or did it come to me from the Other Side? It was horrifying to think my gift may have been given to me by the source of evil and ugliness. How can evil and ugliness make a gift of beauty?” Asher struggles to make sense of how he can be on the side of holiness and beauty if his gift has an evil source—how can his insatiable desire to draw be reconciled with his responsibility to make the world holy?
Asher also grows up hearing about his “mythic ancestor,” a man who had managed the estates of a Russian nobleman but, after the nobleman drunkenly burned down a village and killed many people, began traveling to establish Jewish schools and synagogues. Asher dreams most vividly of his ancestor when he fears his gift’s demonic potential, like after he illicitly draws in a Bible: “[M]y mythic ancestor thundered through the enshrouding fog, his dark-bearded face trembling with rage. There was the roar of moving earth and the roaring sound of his anger […] I felt his words push against me.” Asher fears that his own ancestor, a larger-than-life campaigner for holiness, is somehow furiously opposed to a “demonic” gift Asher can scarcely control. Even if it’s just a dream, it reveals frightening possibilities about Asher’s role in the world, leaving him uncertain whether he is more aligned with God or the demonic “Other Side.”
As an adult, however, Asher questions the clear dichotomy drawn between holiness and the “Other Side,” causing him to believe that human beings are not entirely divine nor entirely demonic, and that he must strike a balance between these two sides. Asher ponders his ancestor’s complicity in the very horrors he dedicated his life to opposing: “You see how a goy behaves, went the whispered word to the child. A Jew does not behave this way. But the [mythic ancestor] had made [the drunken nobleman] wealthy, wondered the child. Is not the Jew also somehow to blame? The child had never given voice to that question.” As an adult, Asher questions whether people’s actions, and hence their moral status, can be as neatly categorized as childhood lessons suggest.
As Asher reconsiders the stark separations he took for granted as a child, he also wonders whether his artistic gift necessarily needs to be categorized as either “holy” or the “demonic”: “A balance had to be given the world; the demonic had to be reshaped into meaning. Had a dream-haunted Jew [his ancestor] spent the rest of his life sculpting form out of the horror of his private night? I did not know. But I sensed it as truth.” This need for “balance” and “sculpting” necessarily demands direct engagement with the “Other Side,” not avoidance or condemnation. Asher ultimately concludes that, “Creativity was demonic and divine. Art was demonic and divine […] I was demonic and divine. Asher Lev, son of Aryeh and Rivkeh Lev, was the child of the Master of the Universe and the Other Side.” Just as his mythic ancestor undertook journeys to atone for the world’s horrors, so Asher, and his creations, are not the sole property of one side or the other. This is how he resolves his fears about the origins of his artistic gift—he cannot hide from the “Other Side” if he truly intends to redeem it. And by working to redeem it, he won’t undermine his community’s efforts at holiness, but will rather strengthen those efforts.
The tragic element of My Name Is Asher Lev is that, though Asher finds a degree of peace by concluding that his art is “both demonic and divine,” he can’t express that belief to his community in a way that restores harmony between himself and them. When he paints the controversial Brooklyn Crucifixion paintings, for example, his fellow Ladover Jews can only see the paintings as blasphemous and thus from the “Other Side”—whereas Asher sees himself as reshaping a “blasphemous” form in order to restore “balance” to his family, whom he’s caused so much pain. On the surface, that effort only produces estrangement between himself, his family, and the community he loves. Thus Potok leaves it ambiguous as to whether Asher’s “balance” between the demonic and the divine is meaningful in the long run.
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The Divine vs. the Demonic Quotes in My Name is Asher Lev
I am an observant Jew. Yes, of course, observant Jews do not paint crucifixions. As a matter of fact, observant Jews do not paint at all—in the way that I am painting. So strong words are being written and spoken about me, myths are being generated: I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.
Well, I am none of those things. And yet, in all honesty, I confess that my accusers are not altogether wrong: I am indeed, in some way, all of those things.
“Asher, you have a gift. I do not know if it is a gift from the Ribbono Shel Olom or from the Other Side. If it is from the Other Side, then it is foolishness, dangerous foolishness, for it will take you away from Torah and from your people and lead you to think only of yourself. I want to tell you something. Listen to me, my Asher. About twenty-five years ago, all the yeshivos in Russia were closed by the Communists, and the students were scattered in different places in small groups. The only groups who continued to fight against this destruction of Torah by the enemies of Torah were the Ladover and Breslover Hasidim […] Asher, we have to make passageways to our people in Russia. We have a responsibility to them. […] They cannot make the opening on their side, so we must make it on our side. Do you understand me, Asher?”
I saw my mythic ancestor again that night, moving in huge strides across the face of the earth, stepping over snow-filled mountains, spanning wide and fertile valleys, journeying, journeying, endlessly journeying. I saw him traverse warm villages and regions of ice and snow. I saw him peer into the windows of secret yeshivos and into the barracks of Siberian camps. […] “And what are you doing with your time, my Asher Lev?” I thought I heard him say […] If You don’t want me to use the gift, why did You give it to me? Or did it come to me from the Other Side? It was horrifying to think my gift may have been given to me by the source of evil and ugliness. How can evil and ugliness make a gift of beauty?
I looked into my Chumash. I stared at the face staring back out at me from the page. I had slanted the eyes somewhat and given the lips beneath the beard a sardonic turn. The Rebbe looked evil; the Rebbe looked threatening; the Rebbe looking out at me from the Chumash seemed about to hurt me. That was the expression he would wear when he decided to hurt me. That was the expression he had worn when he had told my father to go to Vienna. I looked at the framed photograph of the Rebbe on the front wall near the blackboard. The eyes were gray and clear; the face was kind. Only the ordinary dark hat was the same in both pictures. I was frightened at the picture I had drawn. I was especially frightened that I could not remember having drawn it.
I heard her sigh. “I wish I knew what to do,” she said. “I hope the Ribbono Shel Olom will help me not to hurt your father. Look where it’s taken us, Asher. Your painting. It’s taken us to Jesus. And to the way they paint women. Painting is for goyim, Asher. Jews don’t draw and paint.”
“Chagall is a Jew.”
“Religious Jews, Asher. Torah Jews. Such Jews don’t draw and paint. What would the Rebbe say if he knew we were in the museum? God forbid the Rebbe should find out.”
I didn’t know what the Rebbe would say. It frightened me to think that the Rebbe might be angry.
“I wish I knew what to do,” my mother murmured. “I wish your father was home.”
“Listen to me,” my father said. He was speaking suddenly in Yiddish. “I am killing myself for the Ribbono Shel Olom. I have broken up my family for the Ribbono Shel Olom. I do not see my wife for months because of my work for the Ribbono Shel Olom. I came home for Pesach to be with my family, to be with the Rebbe, to rest. And what do I find? You know what I find. And what do I hear? I hear my son telling me he cannot stop drawing pictures of naked women and that man. Listen to me, Asher. This will stop. You will fight it. Or I will force you to return to Vienna with me after the summer. Better you should stay in Vienna and be a little crazy than you should stay in New York and become a goy.”
“Ribbono Shel Olom,” my mother breathed. “Aryeh, please.”
“We must fight against the Other Side, Rivkeh,” my father shouted in Yiddish. “We must fight against it! Otherwise it will destroy the world.”
“Now, between today and the middle of March is a long time. You will do something for me in that time. You will take a journey to the Museum of Modern Art, you will go up to the second floor, and you will look at a painting called Guernica, by Picasso. You will study this painting. You will memorize this painting. You will do whatever you feel you have to do in order to master this painting. Then you will call me in March, and we will meet, and talk, and work. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“It is in my nature to be blunt and honest. I shall ask you a question. You are entering the world of the goyim, Asher Lev. Do you know that? […] It is not only goyim. It is Christian goyim.”
“Yes.”
“You should better become a wagon driver,” he said, using the Yiddish term. “You should better become a water carrier.”
My father carried his burden of pain all through the celebration of my bar mitzvah. People knew of the Rebbe’s decision. No one dared question it. For the Rebbe was the tzaddik and spoke as representative of the Master of the Universe. His seeing was not as the seeing of others; his acts were not as the acts of others. My father’s right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning—the Rebbe. At the same time, no one knew how to react to the decision, for they could see my father’s pain. I had become alien to him. In some incomprehensible manner, a cosmic error had been made. The line of inheritance had been perverted. A demonic force had thrust itself into centuries of transmitted responsibility. He could not bear its presence. And he no longer knew how to engage it in battle. So he walked in pain and shame all through the Shabbos of my bar mitzvah and all through the following day when relatives and friends sang and danced their joy.
“You are entering a religion called painting. It has its fanatics and its rebels. And I will force you to master it. Do you hear me? No one will listen to what you have to say unless they are convinced you have mastered it. Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it […] it is a tradition of goyim and pagans. Its values are goyisch and pagan. Its concepts are goyisch and pagan. Its way of life is goyisch and pagan. In the entire history of European art, there has not been a single religious Jew who was a great painter. Think carefully of what you are doing before you make your decision. I say this not only for the Rebbe but for myself as well. I do not want to spend time with you, Asher Lev, and then have you tell me you made a mistake.
I did not understand what had happened to bring on the idea […] I drew with a pen, working slowly, calmly, and with ease, the segment from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment of the boat beached on the Styx and Charon striking at his doomed passengers with an oar, forcing them onto the shores of torment and hell. I drew much of it from memory, but I wanted to be as accurate as I could, so I checked it repeatedly against a reproduction in a book I had purchased on Michelangelo. I drew the writhing twisting tormented bodies spilling from the boat. I drew the terror on the faces of the dead and the damned. I made all the faces his face, pimply, scrawny—eyes bulging, mouths open, shrieking in horror. I exaggerated the talons and painted ears of Charon; I darkened his face, bringing out the whites of his raging eyes. I folded the drawing and went to bed. […] He said nothing to me about the drawings. But he began to avoid me. His thin face would fill with dread whenever he caught me looking at him. I had the feeling he regarded me now as evil and malevolent, as a demonic and contaminating spawn of the Other Side.
Often in the early mornings, I came out of the house and walked across the dunes to the beach. The dunes were cool then from the night. I wore sandals and shorts and a shirt and had on my tefillin. Those mornings, the beach was my synagogue and the waves and gulls were audience to my prayers. I stood on the beach and felt wind-blown sprays of ocean on my face, and I prayed. And sometimes the words seemed more appropriate to this beach than to the synagogue on my street.
The nobleman was a despotic goy, a degenerate whose debaucheries grew wilder as he grew wealthier. The Jew, my mythic ancestor, made him wealthier. Serfs were on occasion slain by that nobleman during his long hours of drunken insanity, and once houses were set on fire by a wildly thrown torch and a village was burned. You see how a goy behaves, went the whispered word to the child. A Jew does not behave this way. But the Jew had made him wealthy, wondered the child. Is not the Jew also somehow to blame? The child had never given voice to that question. Now the man who had once been the child asked it again and wondered if the giving and the goodness and the journeys of that mythic ancestor might have been acts born in the memories of screams and burning flesh. A balance had to be given the world; the demonic had to be reshaped into meaning. Had a dream-haunted Jew spent the rest of his life sculpting form out of the horror of his private night?
“I understand,” he kept saying. “Jacob Kahn once explained it to me in connection with sculpture. I understand.” Then he said, “I do not hold with those who believe that all painting and sculpture is from the sitra achra. I believe such gifts are from the Master of the Universe. But they have to be used wisely, Asher. What you have done has caused harm. People are angry. They ask questions, and I have no answer to give them that they will understand. Your naked women were a great difficulty for me, Asher. But this is an impossibility.” He was silent for a long moment. I could see his dark eyes in the shadow cast by the brim of his hat. Then he said, “I will ask you not to continue living here, Asher Lev. I will ask you to go away.”
Asher Lev, Hasid. Asher Lev, painter. I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. […] The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. Art was demonic and divine. […] I was demonic and divine. Asher Lev, son of Aryeh and Rivkeh Lev, was the child of the Master of the Universe and the Other Side. Asher Lev paints good pictures and hurts people he loves. Then be a great painter, Asher Lev; that will be the only justification for all the pain you will cause. But as a great painter I will cause pain again if I must. Then become a greater painter.
