My Name is Asher Lev: A Reflection
Asher Lev grows up as a Jewish boy “in a cloistered Hassidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe.” Asher possesses a special gift to feel with his eyes and paint his world in profound ways. “In time, his gift threatens to estrange him” from the only world he knows and the parents he cherishes.
Asher discovers that greatness in an artist is painful. It is painful because an artist who never expresses the scream inside his soul is eventually eaten alive until nothing remains of him but a hollow impostor. It is painful because expressing the scream lays his soul naked before critical eyes who could reject the most sacred part of him. In the end, Asher must choose to be either an impostor or a specimen.
Asher faces a tension when his quest for expression begins pushing the limits of what his parents and community find acceptable for an observant Jew. Asher is an observant Jew. Observant Jews do not paint naked women and for one to paint crucifixions is blasphemous. But Asher is compelled to follow his imagination—that urge in him to express the truth in special ways.
People mistake art for being concerned primarily about beauty. Great art will produce beauty, but art is not fundamentally about beauty. Art is about telling the truth as one sees and feels it. Artists must use every tool at their disposal, even lies, to tell the truth. This truth may be pretty, this truth may be horrific. The irony is that even the most horrific scene, if it is true, will be the most beautiful. It is beautiful because God is revealed in whatever and whoever is true, even in something as horrific as the crucifixion. In the end, there would be no nude woman on display at Asher’s grand exhibit, but there would be a nude man; his name is Asher Lev.
Asher Lev has inspired me to be true to the voice inside of me. I am an artist at heart with a scream I want the whole world to hear, even if few understand it, and even fewer accept it. I would rather be exposed than be an impostor; for I know that through expressing the scream of my soul, though it feels at times like death will actually birth a purer life. And the truth shall set me free.