Chaim Potok, the Jewish rabbi and novelist, died today. Potok's first novels, The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969), and My Name is Asher Lev (1972) span the pivotal years I was a student at Walla Walla College. His urban, Hasidic world of brownstones, taxis, bagels and loch, earlocks, and Torah was about as foreign to my world of rural farmhouses, pickups, range beef, and crew cuts as a Montana farm boy could imagine. Yet in reading Potok's stories I became conscious for the first time of being an Adventist. I lack the skill and the space to bring the plots and characters of Potok's stories to life. Suffice it to say, Potok characters confront decisions that push the boundaries of the Hasidic tradition while leading them to uncover the deepest values and meanings of the tradition.

My own world was never as narrowly defined as the closed, Hasidic world of Potok's characters, but the parallels were strong. We put away all secular books and magazines on Sabbath, so that only Adventist literature showed, and we tried to have morning worship and evening lesson study, but were usually not successful. We were always at church and prayer meeting, and we never missed Ingathering. The difference between my world and that of the characters in Potok's stories was that none of our neighbors were Adventists, nor was my dad's closest friend. And most telling, none of my mother's relatives were Adventist, which inevitably raised boundary issues at Christmas, New Years, and Easter.

The outside world also came into our home in the form of Life and Look magazines, until the pastor had a sermon about Christian purity and made a point of addressing the dangers of the half-dressed starlets that populated the covers and stories of these papers. But we still took National Geographic and Popular Mechanics, which offered their own windows on the world.

Potok's stories are all about the impossibility of a subculture to remain isolated from its umbrella culture. Our academies and to some extent our colleges once tried the path of isolation. We originally built our schools in rural areas and prohibited access to radios and television. But that has changed. The cities have built up around our schools, and school officials have given up policing radios and televisions. After all, students always had access to ideas foreign and even antithetical to Adventism via the school library and the contraband that flooded into the dorms after town and home leaves.

For a community that has long prided itself on its sectarianism, the question rises then, "How can the church retain its identity as Adventist when the lives of its members are thoroughly enmeshed in the life of the wider culture?"

I don't claim to have a full answer to this question. What I do know is that recent moves in the direction of policing theology professors and pruning membership lists are bound to fail. At best, all that such tribunals accomplish is to drive boundary thinking and action undercover, where it does more damage than when it is in the open, or they drive good people from leadership and even membership in the church. At worst they leave irreparable scars where families, colleagues, and friends are torn apart. Jesus warned of this when he said to leave the tares until the harvest because their roots were enmeshed with the wheat.

When Potok was asked why he remained a member of the Jewish faith when the tradition of his birth shunned him and his own personal integrity demanded the very openness to the outer world, his answer was illuminative for Adventists who fear the encroachment of the outside world. He replied that in the first place, he had no alternative. Jewish life was simply who he was. It was the community of his birth. His family and closest friends were Jewish. His thought world was shaped and formed by Jewish schools until he was an adult. Moreover, Potok said, he remained a Jew because he found an alternative to the narrowness of Jewish fundamentalism within the Jewish tradition itself. "Had there been no alternative," he told Terry Gross in a 1986 interview, "as James Joyce was faced by his Catholicism, I would have left Judaism entirely. I had an alternative. I had a non-fundamentist reading of Judaism. I did not have to go the way of James Joyce."

Fortunately, Adventism still contains a rich variety of viewpoints and lifestyles within its membership. However painful the differences, Montana farmers and their physician daughters and physical therapist sons still belong to the same church, even though they likely attend very different churches. If the church is to be a church of all people, including the strangers we unwittingly become to each other as the result of education and life experiences, then we must find a way to embrace our differences without fear of losing our identity.

The practice of art has helps me imagine in a model for how this might take place. In the first place, from the perspective of art, images are extremely resilient to a loss of identification, even when subject to a great deal of transformation. Think of looking in the mirror each morning. We clearly recognize ourselves. But the picture in the photo album from ten years ago records a quite different face. Yet we clearly see that it is our face. Or think of Picasso's famous image of a steer's head made of a bicycle seat and handlebars. A child can tell it is the image of a steer. The point is that we recognize and identify things because of the brain's power to locate common shapes and patterns in the myriad details that bombard it. Without this power to draw associations between differing stimuli, every thing we saw would be an entirely new entity.

The fact is that most of the issues that distinguish one Adventist from another are so minor that they are indistinguishable to those outside the tradition. If we thought of Adventism like an artist, or novelist, or poet might, rather than as a trial lawyer would, we would recognize the multitude of things that comprise our shared identity. Candles on Friday night. Popcorn and apples on Saturday night. FriChik. Sundown tables. Pathfinders. Union College. Ellen White. Camp meeting. Ingathering. Second Coming. State of the dead. Sanctuary. And the list could go on and on. Even when we fight over things like the interpretation of Daniel 8, movie attendance (which is pretty much a dead issue among most Adventist), dancing, etc., we fight over issues and values we hold in common. Strangers see us as one people. We need to see ourselves the same.

Secondly, great art is never fully delineated. Ambiguities, blurred boundaries, tension between lines, shapes, and values, skewed perspectives and the like, always exist-even in the most realistic art of the masters. This is intentional. Leonardo da Vinci is credited with discovering that images look more lifelike and dynamic when the boundaries between lines, planes, tones, and color are left distinct. This is because the eye does not see as camera. It is constantly changing its perspective, its focus of attention, and the aperture of the lens opening. And most of what we see has already moved by the time its image is recorded in our brain. We see in passing what is no longer even there. The great artists are distinguished by their ability capture the essential form and expression of things without getting bogged down with the peripheral. Conversely, amateur art is either so detailed that not a hair on the head is missing or so general that the head of the farmer is indistinguishable from the cabbage he is carrying. Yet, in either case, pictures look artificial and dead. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and the other masters, on the other hand, are able to create a living person, a tree, a monumental palace or a farmer's hut with scarcely a handful of lines. The difference between the work of amateurs and masters is that masters capture the essence of things whereas amateurs get bogged down or overcome with the details.

As Adventists we need more than bland generalities and more than a paint-by-number image of ourselves. We need a living portraiture of ourselves. Perhaps this means we need fewer administrators, theologians, and lawyers to define our identity and more artists who can help us sing, dance, laugh, and cry our identity. We can never make enough rules and laws to hold ourselves together, anymore than we can make enough rules and laws to hold a marriage together or make blacks love whites or Jews respect Palestinians. Relationships are not maintained by legal codes. In contrast, rules of art, like the laws of nature, are shorthand descriptions of life itself. This is perhaps what Jesus was talking about when he says that the codes of law kill, but his teaching makes alive. Jesus had an artist's eye that is reflected in his teaching.

In nature we find established structures, but they are not those imposed by creeds, legal codices, or engineering blueprints. No two of anything are exactly the same. And nothing that is remains forever the same. Yet, we have no trouble identifying apple trees and distinguishing them from other trees. Nor are most of us interested in reducing biodiversity to a few easily understood and controlled specimens.

Why should we treat religious faith differently? If we believe that the God who created the birds of the air and the lilies of the field also created human beings with all of our diversity, why not pursue what is beautiful, excellent, and life-affirming wherever we find it? And who knows, perhaps we should even create sanctuaries in the church to preserve specimens of apparently toxic faith, as biologists preserve lethal viruses for the possible undiscovered benefits they may contain. Jesus, after all, kept Judas in his circle, and many a heretic killed is a prophet mourned.

Because of Chaim Potok I think often about my place in the world as an Adventist. Adventism is richer in my mind because Potok dared to explore the boundaries of his Jewish faith. He will be missed.

Glen Greenwalt can be reached at greegl@hotmail.com