However we number the order of the commandments that constitute the Decalogue — traditions differ as to which is the first of the series and whether the next two constitute one or two separate commands — it is clear that the commandment not to make sculpted images or “any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth” is intimately related to the commandment that we must have no other gods besides God.

Add to this the statement in Devarim 4:12 and 15-18 that says that when God spoke to Israel out of the fire at Sinai, one “heard the sound of words but perceived no shape — nothing but a voice,” and therefore, we are not to make for ourselves “a sculpted image in any likeness whatever.”

From these passages, we learn that God is not to be represented by any image, for God transcends whatever the human mind or imagination can possibly conceive. Nahum Sarna, in his Jewish Publication Society commentary on our passage, explains that any image of God becomes identified with what it represents and in time inevitably replaces God and becomes an object of worship in place of God.

All true. But what is also clear from even the most superficial reading of Torah is that our ancestors did create multiple images of God — but they used a different medium. They did not use wood, stone, paint, or crayons; they used words.

Every page of Torah is replete with word pictures of God. God’s presence, thoughts, feelings, motivations, words, behaviors are central to the drama that is Torah. God emerges in these pages as a living, speaking, feeling, and acting presence. However mysterious God may be, however incomparable to anything we encounter in our world, we end up knowing a great deal about God from the pages of Torah.

In this week’s parsha, God is portrayed as “coming down” on the mountain top and “speaking” to the people. In other texts, God “hides his face,” “stretches out his hand against Egypt,” “places his hand over Moses’ face” so that Moses can see only his back. This God has a rich emotional life: God is pleased, disappointed, hopeful, frustrated. In Bereshit 18, God reveals his innermost motivations about sharing the fate of Sodom and Gomorra with Abraham.

It is this quality of the biblical representation of God that my teacher, Professor Yochanan Muffs, tries to capture in his book The Personhood of God. He echoes here what our teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel captured in his notion of “the divine pathos,” the notion that the central characteristic of the biblical God is to care for the world.

In his book, The Prophets, Heschel rails against what he calls “the anaesthetization of God,” the tendency, in the philosophical tradition, to deprive God of the ability to feel. When we speak of “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” as opposed to “the God of the philosophers,” it is precisely this feature of the living God of the Bible that is being captured.

How else could it be? The abstract, transcendent, distant, all-together God of the philosophical tradition may satisfy our need for intellectual purity, but it hardly satisfies our equally legitimate need for a God who acts in history and whom we can worship, a God who cares about creation, and, as Heschel puts it, who cares about “widows and orphans in Jerusalem.”

So we Jews do not portray God in painting and sculpture, but we always have and will continue to capture this God in a medium in which we are particularly skilled: words.