My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The World in One’s Hands

Sitra Achra, literally The Other Side in Aramaic, is the kabbalistic domain of evil. It contains what is false and impure, the most important component of which is the idea that evil is contained in the Master of the Universe. This idea is not only an impiety, it is also the source of countless other horrors that prevent human beings from appreciating their own reality. The struggle against the Sitra Achra is the central theme of My Name Is Asher Lev, established at the outset and pursued constantly throughout the book.

Evil is a very tricky theological issue. Typically it is either rationalised away as only apparent in a world governed by Providence; or it is considered an aberration brought about by human beings who act in error. Judaic Kabbalah, unlike most religious practices, however, takes the existence of evil seriously as a fundamental and pervasive fact. But it also refuses to fall into the Gnostic trap of including evil as an inherent part of the divine. Evil exists in a sort of parallel universe, one which lacks a crucial component of the divine and its Creation: language.

Such a universe is in one sense impossible to conceive. There are literally no words to describe it. The best we can do it to call it ‘darkness.’ Within this realm of darkness, chaos reigns. Out of it, the darkness seeks to overcome the light, in part by infecting language itself. Stalin, for example, as part of the Sitra Achra kills Jewish writers, both because they are Jewish and because they write, and substitutes Soviet propaganda for divine truth. There are even Jewish Communists who persecute other Jews. Ultimately it is words that killed the writers, the millions of others in Russia, and in the Holocaust - laws, and commands, and secret memoranda, and judicial verdicts, all in the language made unsafe by the Sitra Achra.

Kabbalah can be considered as a mystical approach to disinfecting language by turning language in on itself, using language to undermine the pretensions of language when it becomes something that it shouldn’t - lies, misrepresentations, distortions, and claims to reality. It is not enough to say the Krias Shema before sleep, the Modeh Ani upon waking, or the dozens of other prayers for every other occasion during the day. Even the language of these prayers must transcend language itself.

The artist in a community devoted to the Kabbalah is thus in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, he relativises written and spoken language through his pictorial interpretation of the world, even the world of darkness which is immune from linguistic description. Such interpretation challenges whatever existing representations of reality there might be and therefore is consistent with kabbalistic practice. On the other hand, it is unclear whether any artistic innovation might be yet another attempt by the forces of the Sitra Achra to dim the light of divine guidance. Is such art grace or heresy?

So the issue raised by Asher Lev’s artistic talent is not aesthetic. It is not even moral in the narrow sense of rightness and wrongness. His abilities as a painter have profound significance, not just for the community but for the entire cosmos. An artist attacks the Sitra Achra directly by entering into it with his art. His duty is to bring the Sitra Achra within the world of divine creation by giving it a language, a means of representing itself in order to see itself clearly.

This is a dangerous business. The danger is that the artist attempts to emulate the Master of the Universe rather than act as His instrument. Does the artist represent light or darkness? Is his art a purification or a desecration? These are as much questions for Asher Lev as they are for his community in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights in which even “washing for meals was a cosmic enterprise.”

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