His name is Asher Lev. He has a gift, a great gift. But where does his gift come from?
Asher Lev is Chaim Potok's Hasidic Jewish prodigy from Brooklyn, the boy with a magnificent gift for painting what he feels and what he sees, the hero of the moving story My Name Is Asher Lev.
Hasidic Jews do not paint pictures. They study Torah, they live Torah, the live for the One whom no one can see, and whose face no one can paint. Asher Lev's father lives for the invisible One, the Ribbono She'll Olom.
To Asher's father, drawing and painting are foolish games for a Jewish boy to play. Maybe Asher's gift comes from the place of evil. Asher Lev, though, cannot resist his high gift. A pierce power inside of him drives him to paint everything that has shape and form. Two times he paints nude women, and his pictures are hung in public. This offends his father deeply; he does not look at his son's painting, nor accept his son's gift as a gift of God.
But there is something worse, much worse almost immeasureably worse.
Asher Lev is driven to paint his own family. Especially his mother, who has suffered much because she loves a husband of the forbidding Torah and a son with a forbidden gift. Asher has a need to paint his mother's pain.
He goes to Europe, and there he is captivated, obsessed even, by paintings he sees of the Crucifixion. He has never seen suffering expressed expressed with such power. There is nothing like it in the Jewish tradition, nothing that can serve as mold for the anguish and torment that he feels in his mother. He must paint her suffering in the form of a cross.
The painting becomes a sensation.
Asher's father comes to an art show and sees Asher's work. It is abomination to him. He cannot see it as a painting. He sees a son who has betrayed the Torah, betrayed his people, betrayed his family, betrayed his father, by painting a crucificxion.
The talent is from the place of evil; he knows it now.
When Asher's father leaves the gallery, he does not look at his son. He closes the door of a cab in Asher's face, but does not look at him. The people of the synagogue also turn their faces away from him. The leader of the synagogue tells him he should go away from his people; he is an offense.
Asher moves away, to Europe.
His father does not speak to him when he goes.
How can a father keep a commitment of love and care for a son who denies a father's deepest faith, his truest life?
It is hard for a father and mother to separate themselves from that in which they deeply believe. It is hard for them to see that a child could walk a different path of faith without walking away from them.
A man who had a heavy heart because his son did not believe in Christ. He had worried a lot early on when his son had used some drugs and walked an unsteady line at the edge of dropout. But the worry was nothing like the hurt he felt when he learned that his son could not share his faith.
He felt that his son's loss of faith must have been his fault. If he had only been a better father, lived more consistently, more attractively, his son would have remained a Christian. He was rejecting himself as a father, and projecting his own self-rejection on to his son.
His false guilt led him to feel rejected by his son and his pain tricked him rejecting his son for rejecting him. The conflict was played out entirely within his overloaded conscience.
It was healed there as well. With good counsel, and the discovery that even a "failed" father could forgive himself, this man see that what he had hurt him was not simply his son's inability to share his faith. What had hurt most was his wounded pride, his sense of failing at being the perfect father.
Once he was free from his guilt, he let his care for his son transcend the conflicts of their faiths. He visited his son, who had taken a job on the West Coast and, for the first time, as two adults, they talked, one about his faith and the other about his inability to share it. And their doubts, yes, their doubts, yes, their doubts. The conflict was not undone, but it was set out more plainly for each to see and feels for what it was.
This man took his son's hand and said to him, "I want you to know that your mother and I will always be there for you."
The son said, "I know." That was all. No more.
It was an illumination; a son could turn away from a father's faith and not turn away from the father. A father could mourn a son's lost faith and mourn his son. Caring between persons can survive conflict between faiths.
It isn't as hard on commitments as it used to be when two committed people belong to different sects of the same faith. In the old days Catholic parents would turn their backs on a daughter who married a Protestant boy. A Protestant parents would disown a boy who married a Catholic girl. But we have discovered that conflict of tradition is not the same as a conflict of faith.
Debra from Kenya, a white woman, seriously Protestant, European, and the other Joseph, is a black man, conscientiously Catholic, African. How unlikely just a little while ago that two people such as they would make and keep a commitment of lasting love to each other. But they did and they do, though only as they let themselves unite in a mystical reality at the core of their conflict.
They had to fumble through dark ditches of shared ignorance; neither of them had realized how little they really knew about each other's culture and faith. They tried at first to be beautifully accommodating; for instance, they would get themselves up on Sunday for early service and then drive across Nairobi to the Presbyterian service. But it was all too contrived.
The Protesment larder was bare for Joseph. The Catholic table was too plush for Debra. He wanted Eucharistic drama; she needed Biblical teaching. He was bored by Protestant sobriety; she was leery of Catholic pomp.
So on Sunday mornings, Debra and Joself walked their divergent churchy paths; he off to meet Christ in the early morning Church service, and she to meet Christ in the sermon at the indulgent hour of eleven.
The church service, became the hinge on which the conflict turned. Joseph had been taught that the Catholic Mass transmitted to him the life blood of divinity. Debra had been taught that the Catholic Mass was a cursed idolatry. Two people, an African black man, a Europian white woman, with cultural gaps ten miles wide between them, found that it was not their races or cultures, but this ritual, in which all people were meant to find their oneness, that separated them.
Let's have a coffee
Hari
Enjoy reading...Blessing
