How Much Judaism Remains in Eastern Orthodoxy

There is something in the Eastern tradition that immediately recalls the prayer and experience of the Old Testament. It has to do with the way one encounters God: not through individual emotional expression, but within rhythm, repetition, community, and mystery. The Eastern Christian does not begin with a “personal relationship” with God, but with entering the sacred — with standing inside holiness — and this experience has its roots in biblical Judaism, in the worship of the Temple, in the prayer of Israel, in the way Israel understood God’s presence as dwelling in the midst of the people.

This is visible already in the very concept of holiness: in the East it is not a moral ideal but a space. Something “set apart,” different, veiled in mystery. Like the Holy of Holies in the Temple. The same applies to icons: the gold background is not decoration but testimony that we are looking at another reality, just as Israel did not see God face to face but saw His glory in the cloud. This language permeated Eastern liturgy, which is far more “temple-shaped” than its Western counterpart. Incense, blessings, veils, the iconostasis — these are not embellishments; they echo the ancient structure of the sacred place where God dwelt among His people, separated yet accessible through ritual.

The iconostasis, which the West often perceives as a barrier, is in fact the Eastern interpretation of sacred space, deeply akin to Jewish thinking. Just as the Temple had distinctions between the outer court, the holy place, and the Holy of Holies, so here the faithful see a boundary — not a wall, but a sign that beyond it lies something greater, the realm of Theophany. This combination of nearness and separation is Semitic to the core.

From Judaism also comes the understanding of sacred time. The East does not see the Liturgy as one service among many, but as entry into “God’s time,” analogous to the Sabbath, which was not merely a day of rest but an entrance into the rhythm of creation. The Divine Liturgy has precisely this character: it does not begin or end in a historical sense; it is immersion in the Divine, just as the Sabbath is — in midrashic tradition — “a foretaste of the world to come.”

And then there is prayer as psalmody. The East never abandoned the Hebrew way of praying with psalms — rhythmically, chorally, dialogically, as the voice of the whole community. In Judaism the psalms were not poetry for contemplation but prayer to be sung; the East preserved this. Psalmody is not an ornament. It is the backbone of the liturgy. It sounds like an echo of the synagogue.

Another deep inheritance is apophatic theology — the conviction that one can speak of God mainly in terms of “God is not…” rather than “God is…”. Judaism is radically anti-idolatrous: God’s name is unpronounceable, His essence unrepresentable. The East takes this almost literally. The apophatic theology of the Greek Fathers is not a philosophical exercise but a continuation of the same intuition: that what matters most does not fit into words. This is also why the icon never depicts God the Father — because the Father is not depictable, just as in Judaism God has no face. The icon depicts the Son, because the Son became flesh. The Father — never.

Even the idea of “law” as something more than a code — as a way of life (halakha) — has an echo in the Eastern concept of askesis. It is not morality; it is a “way,” a mode of existence, a structure of daily life, like the rhythm of Israel. The West later shifts the emphasis toward ethics, toward evaluating actions; the East remains with the “way.”

There is also something subtler: the way the human being is perceived. Judaism has no obsession with “original sin” in its fatalistic Western form; it does not see humanity as inherently corrupted but as capable of encountering God and being transformed. The East preserved this spirit: the human being is not primarily guilty but sick; not depraved but incomplete. Hence theosis — deification. Not punishment and judgment as the foundation, but healing and transformation. This mindset is far closer to the biblical prophets than to Latin scholasticism.

This, of course, does not mean that Eastern Christianity is “more Jewish.” It means that in its development it strikingly often preserves the Old Testament way of encountering God: full of awe, space, ritual, mystery, song, ambiguity, searching — but also full of the fundamental joy of “the feast of the Lord.” The West followed a different path — more legal, more historical, more philosophical. The East retained something that still pulses with the heartbeat of Israel.