My Name Is Asher Lev

Luke Ford writes:

I discuss this novel with Monica, an English Literature professor.

We were prompted with these questions by another English Lit professor — a Christian — who’s teaching the book to her class:

1. Early on in My Name Is Asher Lev, Asher sees his father reading a passage from the tractate Sanhedrin which says that “Any man who has caused a single Jewish soul to perish, the Torah considers it as if he had caused a whole world to perish; and any man who has saved a Jewish soul, it is as if he had saved a whole world” (11). Asher, in response, asks if this concept applies only to the Jew, to which his father replies that “No . . . . Elsewhere the same passage appears without the word ‘Jewish.’” Nevertheless, throughout the novel, both Asher’s father and the mashpia ascribe a special worth to the Jewish soul which they deny to the goy; for example, Asher’s father at one point, in imagining Asher will soon become a goy, asserts, “Better you should not have been born” (176). Can we read such instances as distortions of genuine Judaic principles? What distinctions does the Jewish tradition, at its core, make between Jews and non-Jews, and are these distinctions identical to those held by the Hasidic sect?

2. What would you say are the chief characteristics of Hasidism that distinguish it from regular Judaism?