Does God have a body?

Judaism teaches us two contradictory answers to the question: Does God have a body? On one hand our religion asserts that God is a spiritual being and has no bodily form. Yet many of us believe in what I like to call “the God you grew up with in Hebrew school”: God is a king with a long white beard who sits on a throne up in heaven.

The Bible is the main source for the view that God has a body. From Genesis, we learn that God has a voice. God used words to create the world. And in the course of the Bible, God talks to many people to give them instruction and advice including Noah, Abraham and Moses. God even speaks to the whole people of Israel, all 600,000 of them, on Mt. Sinai when dictating the 10 commandments. Clearly God has a voice, and a powerful and loud one at that!

If God has a voice, it stands to reason that God would have a mouth too. In Temple, when we finish reading the Torah on Saturday morning, the rabbi lifts the scroll high in the air for all to see. While the Torah is held up, the congregation sings: “This is the Torah that Moses wrote down and placed before the Israelites, from the mouth of God.”

And if God has a mouth, perhaps God also has a face. At the end of the Friday night Shabbat service, I bless the congregation. I ask all to rise and I raise my hands in the air. Looking over the whole sanctuary, I recite the words of the Priestly Blessing which come from the Torah: “May God bless you and Keep you. May God’s light shine upon you and be gracious to you. May God lift up His face towards you and Grant you Peace.”

The Priestly Blessing says that God has a face, panim in Hebrew. The Yiddish word punum as in “You have such a cute punum” comes from the same root. Even though some prayer books like to translate panim as “God’s Countenance” the clear and obvious meaning is that God has a face.
One of my congregants told me that he believes that God does have a face. For him, it is easier to have a relationship with God if God has a body. The more human-like that God is, the closer we feel to God. I thought that was a very insightful point.

However for many people, including myself, the idea that God has a body is problematic. Is God really so human-like? Do we believe that God has a face that person can see?