- Jacob Kahn asks Asher to do increasingly non-kosher things, like read the New Testament and look at the Christian painter Guido Reni's Massacre of the Innocents, which portrays a scene from the Book of Matthew.
- Asher likes this Christian art because it shows angst and suffering in a way that feels real to him. He reads a bunch of art stuff instead of doing his homework from yeshiva.
- Asher goes to Jacob Kahn's fancy Manhattan apartment and meets a gallery owner, Anna Schaeffer, who represents Jacob Kahn and is kind of skeptical about a hyper-religious Jewish boy being an art prodigy. When she sees his sketchbooks, though, she definitely believes in his talent.
- Jacob Kahn warns Asher that painting is basically a new religion—a "pagan" one—and that everything about it sort of flies in the face of the Jewish tradition. Then he basically tells Asher that he's a genius and needs to study painting.
- Asher starts coming to Jacob Kahn's apartment regularly—so regularly that the doorman asks him if he's studying to become a painter. And he pretty much is. He paints with Jacob Kahn night and day and learn about famous Christian painters like nobody's business and barely has time for his homework, which he didn't care that much about anyway.