Asher Lev

In My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok tells of a young man and his troubling family dynamic. Lev holds a prodigious artistic ability, an ability which is both marginalized by his family, due to their conflicting religious convictions, and the subject of great inner strife for Asher as a result. The Lev household’s patriarch, Aryeh Lev, has a deep rooted dedication to the teachings of a Chabad-esque scholar and leader of the Ladover Jewish movement, simply known to his supporters as “the Rebbe”, a dedication he shared with his late brother-in-law who died on business for the Rebbe. His work for the Rebbe and his various initiatives bring both Asher trouble in deciding whether to pursue his gift and passion or stay true to his religious upbringing, and Aryeh’s wife, Rivkeh, anxiety over Aryeh’s fate potentially turning out to be like her late brother’s. Much of the family’s life is shrouded by the enigmatic “Rebbe”, a man whose words influence Asher’s father to dedicate his life to unifying the Judaic diaspora and providing unity to a considerably wounded community and indirectly fuels the animosity between Asher and his father, among other things. The devotion to the Rebbe in the novel symbolizes the various effects a religious movement can have on a family’s dynamic or in a community as a whole -- reverence or alienation in both settings are roads young followers are supposed to choose between at some point, as was in the case of Asher. In My Name Is Asher Lev, the cult of personality that develops behind the Rebbe and his movement symbolizes both the various benefits and strains of a centralized religious movement in a variety of settings. The Ladover community and movement displays a strong embodiment of Judaic teachings and texts, often biding strongly by the word of the Torah and the like. The emphasis the Rebbe and the community places on using Judaic text as a map for how life should be lived has potential to create a rift between the community and even the most slightly casual Jew. This said rift is displayed by Asher’s interactions with the rest of his community pertaining the art he produces and the subjects they deal with: “The teacher glared down at me. ‘Listen, Rembrandt Lev.’ There was loud laughter... ‘In my class we study Torah’” (Potok 238). While in his Ladover Yeshiva (a Judaic academic institution usually dedicated to the study of religious text), his teacher takes an opportunity to belittle Asher for his penchant for art and his comparative disregard to the study of the Torah simultaneously. Later in class, Asher finds a note in his Gemorra (a component of the Talmud, another ancient religious text) expressing similar belittling sentiments: “Asher Lev Won’t go to Heav; To Hell he’ll go Far down below” (Potok 239).
In embodying the Ladover belief of strict interpretation and devotion to Judaic texts, the community in itself naturally rejects any notion of nonconvention found in the community’s confines. Though a Jew like them, attending the same Yeshiva and learning from the same teacher, students at the Landover Yeshiva feel compelled to mock and marginalize Asher’s passion and work. In Asher’s situation, the Ladover community as a whole symbolizes a community of, to some degree, xenophobia. To the reader, it symbolizes an oddly tight-knit community that rejects any sort of deviation from the norm. The Ladover community and devotion to the Rebbe unveil a side of orthodoxy that’s unwelcoming and resentful to unconventionality, yet in its isolation is found to be completely normal and somewhat welcomed by members of the community. Asher Lev has devout passion for the arts rather than Talmudic analysis, posing him to be an outcast and a stranger to the rest of the Ladovers. The religious movement, though providing unification for its diasporic members, personifies an iron curtain (akin to Soviet relations to the outside world) in that the religious movement (and perhaps unified religious movements in general) are content with “keeping things the way they are” rather than interacting with other facets of culture. To those not associated with its traditions, values or history, the Landovers symbolize a demographic of the West that indirectly promotes isolation and effectively accentuating religion’s role in said isolation. The Rebbe and his movement emphasize a sense of discipline and morality among his followers. While one lense might see the Landover movement as committing to serial-ostracizing and close-minded, another perspective shows characters like Aryeh as committing to acts of selflessness and living meager, simple lives, as seen in the following excerpt: “[The Landover headquarters] contained offices, meeting rooms, a room with about a dozen mimeograph machines, two suites of rooms for the editorial offices of various Landover publications, and a small press in the basement. Men came and went all day long. They sat behind desks, met in conference rooms, rushed along corridors, talked frenetically, sometimes quietly, sometimes in loud voices. All the men were bearded and wore dark skullcaps and dark suits with white shirts and dark ties. No women worked inside the building; secretarial work was done by men” (Potok 22). Coupled with the imagery of Aryeh being showered in praise by Krinsky, a Russian Jew he brought to America from confinement in Siberia, this side of the impact of the Landover movement and the work of the Rebbe symbolizes the societal good religious movements such as the Landovers can have. Through an organized, swift and disciplined manner, men like Aryeh are empowered by the Rebbe and the Landover movement to bring some sort of good to both their ethnic and religious community. Selflessly putting themselves out into various crevices of the world to promote moral dialogue and help those in need paints a different picture of individuals who serve the Landover movement. While in some ways the movement and its leader symbolize an isolationist cause, in other ways it also symbolizes the selfless good will espoused by movements similar to it today (albeit being wrapped around in religious rhetoric). Landovers are organized, and as previously mentioned, strict to their faith, but said strictness illustrates a different image of the Landovers -- a religious group who bides by its ruling principles out of selflessness, showing that religious devotion has a variety of outcomes and byproducts. The Rebbe and the Landover movement illustrate different facets of religious rhetoric and organized religious movements. In some ways, they can serve only to serve themselves, ostracizing the unconventional and shunning new thought, slowly turning into an anachronism more than anything. In other ways, the same attitude found in religious movements can show to be selfless and humanitarian, bringing people to positive outcomes through their no-nonsense, devote approach to their ruling tenets and faith. In My Name Is Asher Lev, the Rebbe and his Landover movement symbolize a variety of sides of an eastern religious movement entrenched in the west, showing both that religious movements and their devotees can lead to unfriendly ostracism, or can equally represent selfless good will in a society where that’s rarely heralded.