Why is Judaism so resistant to images of God?
I confronted this question unexpectedly last summer in Rome.My wife and I joined a walking tour we had carefully chosen to avoid entering churches. As observant Jews, we don’t enter such spaces casually.
Midway through, however, our guide led us into one anyway. Everyone else walked in. We paused at the threshold, unsure whether to follow.
Concerned about causing offense, we stepped inside and looked up.
Gold shimmered across vaulted Baroque ceilings and ornate altars, and sculpted religious figures rose from alcoves and shrines—so different from the spare synagogues I had grown up in.
While standing there, I began to understand what had happened at Sinai.
The Golden Calf did not begin as a conscious rejection of God. Moses had ascended the mountain to receive the Torah, and when he did not return at the expected time, the people panicked. Fearing they had been abandoned, they turned to Aaron and asked for something that could “go before them”—something visible and concrete to lead them. Aaron fashioned a calf from gold, and they gathered around it. They were not abandoning God so much as quieting their fear with something they could see.
That impulse is deeply human. When something matters profoundly, we want to give it form.
Yet the Torah resists that instinct. Biblical monotheism, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noted, refuses to reduce God to what we can see. The moment we fix transcendence in material form, we mistake the symbol for realityfor the reality.
Standing in that church, I was confronting Judaism’s deep insistence on God’s invisibility. I began to see why the Torah is so wary of divine images: they turn mystery into matter.
Rabbi Sacks often pointed to the prophet Elijah’s encounter with God on Mount Horeb in the book of Kings. Elijah stands on the mountain as a great wind tears through the rocks, followed by an earthquake and then a fire. But the biblical text insists that God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire. Only afterward comes a kol demamah dakah—a still, small voice. Divine presence is not in spectacle—it is in the quiet demand to live differently.
This is the Torah’s revolution. God is not located in objects, but in moral action. That is why Jewish life centers on study, prayer, and mitzvot—deeds—rather than sacred images. Our sanctuaries hold Torah scrolls, not statues. We express reverence through words, study, and the way we live.
The Golden Calf teaches what happens when we grow impatient with the unseen. We demand something immediate and visible. But faith requires the humility to accept that God cannot be contained.
God’s presence is not something we build. It is something we live.
Josh Poyurs is the Vice Head of Kodesh and Ethos, leads strategic projects, and is a Faculty Member at Yeshiva College, the second largest Jewish school in South Africa with over 800 students. Josh combines his Masters in Clinical and Research Psychology, his MBA, his experience in both management consulting and tech, and his years of learning in Yeshiva and Kollel, to deliver meaningful classes, and transformative projects that are backed by science and infused with a Torah ethos. He is a member of the third cohort of the international Rabbi Sacks Legacy Scholars Programme, and lives in Johannesburg with his wife, Ashleigh.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
