Let My People Know

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz; “The widespread use of figures of speech drawn from the human image.”

Precisely because of the prevalence of metaphorical statement, and the widespread use of figures of speech drawn from the human image, it becomes all the more necessary to emphasize that they are allegorical truths and not actual descriptions of reality.

For there was a certain danger that the word pictures, or imagistic descriptions, of sacred symbols in the Bible-and even more so in the Kabbalah-could lead to a crude material apprehension of the divine essence and of the higher reality.

Hence the prohibition against all depiction of holiness through physical, plastic means.

Accompanying it, and perhaps stemming from this extreme revulsion to plastic semblance of the Divine, Jewish tradition also maintains a certain suspicion of man’s tendency to design, elaborate, and portray himself.

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz