Extremes Collide in My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim PotokIn My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok writes about a young boy in a Hasidic community of Landover in Brooklyn who is an excellent artist. Asher travels through childhood holding on to his art, but when his art interferes with his religious studies, Asher's two worlds of art and Torah collide. Potok deliberately chooses extreme icons and symbols of secular life, such as the world of art, on the one hand, and Judaism, the Hasidim, and the Rebbe, on the other, to intensify the contrast between them, because he wants to shape the characters in visions he has and to show how different the two worlds are and how they conflict and interact. The way Potok sets up My Name is Asher Lev is to make the two worlds of Judaism and secularism conflict. It does this by using many key icons and symbols of the two ways of life. It employs extreme Jewish symbols and symbolic systems, such as Hasidism, the Rebbe, Asher's father, Gemarah, Shabbos, and highly symbolic holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Passover, to represent a barrier between Asher, his community, and the rest of the world. . He then uses extreme secular symbols such as Russia, art, and, in art, crucifixions, nudes, and Asher's artistic mentor, Jacob Kahn, to show the radical differences between the two. At one point (in book 3, chapter 10) Jacob says to Asher, "You're too religious to be an abstract expressionist..." ... "We are uncomfortable in the universe. We are rebellious and individualistic. We welcome accidents in painting. You are emotional and sensual but you are also rational. This is your background in Landover...." Potok makes the Hasidim seem like a dying culture by telling stories about them in the past, and much of Asher's . awareness of his heritage, his dreams and perceptions of his grandfather (chapter 3, page 98). "That night he came to me from the woods, my mythical ancestor, huge, mountainous, dressed in his dark caftan and fur-trimmed cap, making his way through the trees on his Russian master's estate, the trembling earth, the trembling mountains , thunder in his voice." As for the other extreme throughout the book, there is an ongoing conflict within Asher about what he is expected and allowed to draw from an artistic point of view, and what is deemed unacceptable by him father, Asher's main religious influence..