Send this to a friend Ismar Schorsch is the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. A good question has a long afterlife. It does not let go of us till it gets the kind of answer it deserves. I was taken aback for I too had been grappling with the question which cuts to the core of Judaism. The truth is that Judaism offers us little to look at.
Synagogues are and always have been bereft of icons.
As Prof. Lee I. Levine of the Hebrew University shows in his masterful new book on the history of the ancient synagogue, pagans put an idol in the apse of their temples. In contrast, Jews in Palestine, by the third century C.E. had chosen to adorn the apse of their synagogues with an ark for the Torah. Architecture mirrored theology. Creator of the cosmos and unfettered by nature, the God of the Torah defied representation. The second of the Ten Commandments condemned the impulse to give artistic expression to God who is incarnate only in the words of a sacred book.