Chaim Potok and Substitutionary Atonement

From an interview with Chaim Potok conducted by Seattle Pacific University’s institutional publication Response before Potok spoke at the U on October 29, 1997, it transpires that at Seattle Pacific, the novels The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev are read in the freshman core classes.

SPU clearly has some smart cookies running the show. The novels named make excellent reads for young people of all ages.

My Name is Asher Lev is an important book for me. The meaning of the Cross has been clear to me ever since I read it.

Before I read it, I wrestled with the concepts of substitutionary atonement and vicarious suffering many a time, but to no avail. After reading up on the doctrines in systematic theologies and the like, I would come away thinking I understood. Then, a few months later, I couldn’t clearly remember what I had supposedly understood.

Doctrines tend to be mediated by abstractions and syllogisms that are hard to retain. While I almost never preach without enunciating what I take to be propositional truth in abstract form, I’m told by parishioners it doesn’t stick unless it is wedded to one or more memorable exemplifications. I could have told myself that, but you know how it goes.

Vicarious suffering is of the warp and woof of life. Simply put, we cannot survive unless someone suffers on our behalf at any number of junctures during our lives. It begins with someone giving birth to us. It concludes with someone caring for us as we die.

One of the most moving, human scenes a human being can witness is the birth of a child through pain and suffering. The suffering has meaning because it is endured for a purpose. An equally moving scene is that of a husband caring for his wife who has Alzheimer’s disease. The love and suffering that is fused in the moment a husband holds the hand of his wife who no longer recognizes him is breathtaking.

Suffering on behalf of others is not only constitutive of the beginning and end of life. It also stands in the middle. Vicarious suffering is at the heart of the life of a family. When babies cry and can’t sleep, someone else doesn’t sleep on their behalf. When a daughter gets into her mother’s pills, a frightening ordeal begins which may last through the night in a hospital ER. The suffering of a child leads to the suffering of mother and father, all of which is borne resolutely and for a purpose. Parents, mothers especially, suffer intensely on behalf of their children for things small and things large. It’s for a purpose, and that purpose is, for the sake of the child. And if raising a child means bearing in one’s body and memory and emotions the rejection and incomprehension of the one being raised, the weight and the scars caused thereby are resolutely borne. And by those stripes, healing, if healing is to happen, becomes possible.

The attentive reader will have already realized that we have reached the portals of Isaiah 53. There is a species of human suffering which has the power to bear the consequences of the rejection and incomprehension of others, and to defeat both in the process.

Asher Lev, the protagonist of Potok’s novel referred to above, is the only child of an ultra-orthodox Jewish family of Brooklyn. He has a magnificent, terrible gift. He is an extraordinarily gifted artist from a tender age; he cannot stop himself from being an artist without doing grave damage to his own being; but he is also an orthodox Jew, and therefore cannot be an artist without violating one of his faith’s most fundamental prohibitions. The Rebbe understands this and seeks a way for Asher, but Asher’s father does not understand, and regards the gift as the gift of the devil. The suffering caused to Asher by his father’s incomprehension is virtually unfathomable. But Asher’s father is himself a suffering man, who dedicates his life to saving Jews around the world. He is almost always gone, and thus leaves suffering behind him even as he seeks to alleviate suffering in front of him.

Asher’s mother is in the middle. She bears in her body the signs of love and anxiety for her husband, whom she fears will not return, and for her son, who seems to have already departed. They live with and love each other, but they do not understand one another. Asher does what artists do. He paints his way to understanding. He sublimates his suffering, the suffering of his father, and the suffering of his mother in a painting that could not be more shocking for the symbolic medium he chooses:

I stretched a canvas identical in size to the painting now on the easel. I put the painting against a wall and put the fresh canvas in its place. With charcoal, I drew the frame of the living-room window of our Brooklyn apartment. I drew the strip of wood that divided the window and the slanting bottom of the Venetian blind a few inches from the top of the window. On top--not behind this time, but on top--of the window I drew my mother in her housecoat, with her arms extended along the horizontal of the blind, her wrists tied to it with the cords of the blind, her legs tied at the ankles to the vertical of the inner frame with another section of the cord of the blind. I arched her body and twisted her head. I drew my father standing to her right, dressed in a hat and coat and carrying an attache case. I drew myself standing to her left, dressed in paint-spattered clothes and a fisherman's cap and holding a palette and a long spearlike brush. I exaggerated the size of the palette and balanced it by exaggerating the size of my father's attache case. We were looking at my mother and at each other. I split my mother's head into balanced segments, one looking at me, one looking at my father, one looking upward. The torment, the tearing anguish I felt in her, I put into her mouth, into the twisting curve of her head, the arching of her slight body, the clenching of her small fists, the taut downward pointing of her thin legs...I painted swiftly in a strange nerveless frenzy of energy. For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other's throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting--an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.[1]

What can I say? If you do not understand what vicarious suffering and substitutionary atonement are after reading this passage, I have little hope for you. Perhaps the passage is harder to understand than I think. Perhaps it’s necessary to read the entire novel to feel the full force of the above words. I don’t know. The novel is an easy read. I recommend it.

In the following scripture, substitute “she” and “her” (Asher’s mother) for “he” and “his,” and read “our” as spoken by Asher in reference to himself and his father:

וְהוּא מְחֹלָל מִפְּשָׁעֵנוּ

מְדֻכָּא מֵעֲוֹנֹתֵינוּ

מוּסַר שְׁלוֹמֵנוּ עָלָיו

וּבְחַבֻּרָתֹו נִרְפָּא־לָנוּ[2]

But he was pierced for our transgression,

crushed because of our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,

and by his wounds we are healed.

                                   (Isaiah 53:5, my translation)

In this scripture, let the speaker become Asher’s mother, “them” her husband and son:

 Father, forgive them,

for they know not what they do.

                                                        (Luke 23:34)

 

This post is the third and final installment of a series, “Salvation is from the Jews.” Go here and here for the other installments.

Rev. Sam links to this post. Thanks.

 

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[1] Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972). Mary Boys, who also quotes this passage in an article available online, is reminded also of Marc Chagall's "White Crucifixion" (1938).

 [2]  וּבַחֲבֻרָתֹו  in MT repointed in accordance with probable sense.
 

Comments

[Bob MacDonald]

I am not surprised you picked Asher Lev - I must reread these novels.

[Rev Sam]

The pleasure was all mine! Have to say I'm dead impressed with your Breakfast Club reference as well....

[JohnFH]

Hi, Rev. Sam. The reference, of course, comes by way of Kyle Covett, whose blog you will like.