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A review by lory_enterenchanted
The Gift of Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
challenging
emotional
medium-paced
Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle
Read immediately following the first book, My Name Is Asher Lev. Fascinating glimpse into the world of the Hasidim and simultaneously into the soul of a visual artist. The two destinies are not easy to reconcile.
The personal blindness and intransigence of Asher's family and community, set side by side with their idealism and sense of spiritual mission, is hard to take. There is not much said about this, it's just there, in the way they raised Asher, abandoning him, subjecting him to traumatic loss and grief, and then trying to make him feel guilty for being himself, telling a child his drawing gift was from the Dark Side, taking his son away from him. Yet Asher sticks with his tradition and does not turn against or abandon it, finding some truth in it that he can't deny. With his creative urge, he seems able to live with opposing polarities. Painfully, though.
I wish there had been some more nuanced exploration of Lev's crucifixion theme in his painting. Everybody just says "What, a crucifixion?! But you're Jewish!" And they think it's either horrendous or cool, depending on their disposition, and everything just stops there in an impossible cognitive dissonance. But there is more to the crucifixion than a polarizing religious sign for Christian intolerance and Jewish trauma. Didn't Plato write of the world soul being crucified on the world-body? And the sun-cross is an ancient symbol. These are archetypal, cosmic themes, not only matters of religious dogma. But nobody takes that up.
In many ways, it's Asher who is continually crucified in these books, although he himself does not point that out. His community wants to create a world of beauty and goodness on their own terms, keeping themselves pure, a "cult of innocence" as I heard it described reccently. He, Asher, just wants to create, not to leave out all the painful or uncomfortable parts, but to be responsible only to the reality of the work. And he bears the vilification and the misunderstanding largely in silence. (There are whole pages when he says nothing but "Yes" or "No" or is silent.) We, the readers, have to suffer with him and to ask ourselves how we would react in such a situation, whether we could keep creating in the face of such opposition.
Too bad there was not a third book showing Asher's son as the Rebbe, that would have been interesting to see. Would the son of the outcast bring change? Or would he, too, turn against his father? We'll never know, sadly.
"All men of wisdom know that there are endless worlds and spheres, and in each sphere there are tens of thousands of heavenly creatures, beings without end, without number, all emanating from the single act of creation. The mouth cannot utter it, the mind cannot fathom it. And among the heavenly beings themselves there are gradations and categories without end, higher and higher--and all are possessed of wisdom, and all acknowledge their Creator. But our little world, our suffering world, in its closeness to the lowest of the spheres and with its mixture of good and evil because of the sin of Adam and Eve--how does our world continue to exist? What creates harmony between the upper and the lower worlds? That, my Asher, is perhaps the most difficult riddle of all.
"Asher Lev, our teachers tell us that this harmony is the special creation of individuals who engage in certain deeds for the sake of the deeds themselves. Such deeds rise as a song, as the greatest of art, to all the spheres. And when the heavenly beings hear this song they take upon themselves gladly the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, and they exclaim in unison, Holy! Holy! Holy!--and there is peace in all of creation, and peace to all of Israel, and the beginning of an end to the exile."
Read immediately following the first book, My Name Is Asher Lev. Fascinating glimpse into the world of the Hasidim and simultaneously into the soul of a visual artist. The two destinies are not easy to reconcile.
The personal blindness and intransigence of Asher's family and community, set side by side with their idealism and sense of spiritual mission, is hard to take. There is not much said about this, it's just there, in the way they raised Asher, abandoning him, subjecting him to traumatic loss and grief, and then trying to make him feel guilty for being himself, telling a child his drawing gift was from the Dark Side, taking his son away from him. Yet Asher sticks with his tradition and does not turn against or abandon it, finding some truth in it that he can't deny. With his creative urge, he seems able to live with opposing polarities. Painfully, though.
I wish there had been some more nuanced exploration of Lev's crucifixion theme in his painting. Everybody just says "What, a crucifixion?! But you're Jewish!" And they think it's either horrendous or cool, depending on their disposition, and everything just stops there in an impossible cognitive dissonance. But there is more to the crucifixion than a polarizing religious sign for Christian intolerance and Jewish trauma. Didn't Plato write of the world soul being crucified on the world-body? And the sun-cross is an ancient symbol. These are archetypal, cosmic themes, not only matters of religious dogma. But nobody takes that up.
In many ways, it's Asher who is continually crucified in these books, although he himself does not point that out. His community wants to create a world of beauty and goodness on their own terms, keeping themselves pure, a "cult of innocence" as I heard it described reccently. He, Asher, just wants to create, not to leave out all the painful or uncomfortable parts, but to be responsible only to the reality of the work. And he bears the vilification and the misunderstanding largely in silence. (There are whole pages when he says nothing but "Yes" or "No" or is silent.) We, the readers, have to suffer with him and to ask ourselves how we would react in such a situation, whether we could keep creating in the face of such opposition.
Too bad there was not a third book showing Asher's son as the Rebbe, that would have been interesting to see. Would the son of the outcast bring change? Or would he, too, turn against his father? We'll never know, sadly.
"All men of wisdom know that there are endless worlds and spheres, and in each sphere there are tens of thousands of heavenly creatures, beings without end, without number, all emanating from the single act of creation. The mouth cannot utter it, the mind cannot fathom it. And among the heavenly beings themselves there are gradations and categories without end, higher and higher--and all are possessed of wisdom, and all acknowledge their Creator. But our little world, our suffering world, in its closeness to the lowest of the spheres and with its mixture of good and evil because of the sin of Adam and Eve--how does our world continue to exist? What creates harmony between the upper and the lower worlds? That, my Asher, is perhaps the most difficult riddle of all.
"Asher Lev, our teachers tell us that this harmony is the special creation of individuals who engage in certain deeds for the sake of the deeds themselves. Such deeds rise as a song, as the greatest of art, to all the spheres. And when the heavenly beings hear this song they take upon themselves gladly the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, and they exclaim in unison, Holy! Holy! Holy!--and there is peace in all of creation, and peace to all of Israel, and the beginning of an end to the exile."