How Much Judaism Remains in Eastern Orthodoxy

All these threads — the icon, the liturgy, the prohibition against depicting God, apophatic theology, the rhythm of sacrifice — ultimately converge in a single source. Eastern Orthodoxy, though formed in the Greek world, thinks about God far more like Israel than like the late Latin West. It is not that Orthodoxy “borrowed” something from Judaism. It is that it avoided cutting the umbilical cord that ties Christianity to its root.

Judaism taught that God is present yet ungraspable. Near yet uncontained. Audible yet invisible. Orthodoxy embraced this paradox without trying to domesticate it. It left God within His mystery. In the icon this is immediately visible: only the One who took flesh can be depicted. Everything else remains in the gold of the background, in the formless light. The West needed an image of God the Father; the East knew such a path led nowhere.

Judaism prayed in rhythm, not improvisation. Orthodoxy did the same. The Liturgy is like tamid: steady, unchanging, pulsing with a daily rhythm that does not exhaust but sanctifies. What matters is not the sermon, nor emotion, nor the priest’s personal interpretation. What matters is entry into sacred time — participation in the rhythm of God, who continues always. This is Semitic to the bone.

Judaism held that holiness is a space, not an idea. Orthodoxy thinks the same way. The iconostasis is neither decoration nor barrier. It is a symbolic threshold, like the veil in the Temple. Theology did not invent the iconostasis; intuition did: God is near, but His nearness does not abolish mystery. Holiness requires a boundary — otherwise it dissolves into banality.

Judaism did not obsess over “sin as guilt.” It cared about the path: covenant, transformation, slow movement toward God. Orthodoxy adopted this logic almost unchanged. Its fundamental word is not “punishment” but theosis — deification. The human being is not so much guilty as unfinished. And therefore God does not primarily judge; He heals. This is the mind of the prophets, not the jurists.

Judaism loved the psalms. Orthodoxy never abandoned them. The West turned toward scholastic forms of prayer; the East remained faithful to the psalmic melody, which is not a hymn but prayer in its most archaic form. This is why Eastern prayer sometimes sounds as though the veil of the Temple is still being torn somewhere in the background.

And finally, perhaps most importantly: in Judaism God is someone who cannot be contained by a concept, not even by a name. Orthodoxy, through the voices of its Fathers, repeats the same truth: theology begins with silence. Not with definitions or systems, but with acknowledging that God surpasses everything — even our best words for Him. This is why, in the East, the name of Jesus is not an abstraction but a prayer. And theology is not a system but contemplation.

When one gathers all these threads, a strikingly coherent picture emerges: Orthodoxy did not “take something from Judaism” so much as preserve those elements of spirituality that were from the beginning part of the biblical DNA — elements that the West, through the development of philosophy, law, and individualism, transformed into a different, equally valuable, but distinct religious path.

Orthodoxy is more Semitic in its way of prayer, more biblical in its sense of holiness, more Old Testament in the structural rhythm of its liturgy, more faithful to the prohibition of depicting God, more open to mystery, more skeptical of intellectual certainty, more loyal to what cannot be spoken — but can be sung in a psalm, veiled, incensed, revealed, made present.

This does not mean that Judaism and Orthodoxy are doctrinally close. But in terms of spiritual sensitivity — in their way of experiencing God, in their understanding of holiness — they share what Scripture calls the fear of the Lord: the awareness that the Divine is fire, not to be domesticated, but approached with trembling and love.

One final note completes the meaning of this series: why speak about Judaism at all when writing about Orthodoxy, about icons, about frescoes? Why is this not merely a historical curiosity or an easy “comparative religion parallel”? And why — when I write about Byzantine churches, about Pagomenos, about Cretan frescoes — do I enter the world of ancient Israel?

Because if one wants to reach the heart of the icon, one must go deeper than Byzantium. Icons are not born from an artist’s imagination. They do not exist because someone wanted to “illustrate” a biblical scene. They are not decoration. They are not aesthetics. They are continuity. One can understand them only by understanding their root: the prayer of Israel, its way of experiencing holiness, its relationship to image and word, its intuition that God cannot be contained in form — unless He Himself chooses to appear.

The West developed its own theology of the image — beautiful, important — but detached from that ancient, heavy, severe biblical soil. The East never cut itself off from it. Not because it wanted to be “more Jewish,” but because it never forgot that Revelation began before the Gospel, before Christ — in the voices of the prophets, in the psalms, in the Temple, in the prohibition of images, in the rhythm of the tamid.

If one forgets this, the icon becomes a riddle. If one remembers — everything becomes coherent.

This is why I write about Judaism. Because without it, the icon becomes flat. The fresco loses its meaning. Byzantine aesthetics begins to look exotic rather than theologically necessary. One cannot truly enter the logic of Eastern painting without realizing that it is the extension of Revelation itself — not only Christian Revelation, but biblical Revelation in its deepest sense.

The icon looks as it does because it could not look otherwise. The fresco is what it is because it springs from a centuries-long conviction that God cannot be confined to human imagination — but can be encountered in light, in rhythm, in symbol, in a space that is more prayer than image. And this cannot be understood without returning to the sources — not to Byzantium, but to Israel, to the psalms, to the Temple, to the very beginning of thinking about God.

Only then does Orthodoxy cease to seem exotic and become logical. And only then do the frescoes in the stone churches of Crete — severe, beautiful, full of light — begin to speak with their full voice.