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As a result of receiving the Torah, the Jewish people waged a prolonged battle against idol worship which was ultimately successful. The world progressed, and two large religions arose directly influenced by Judaism - Christianity and Islam. However, they still accommodated elements of idolatry. Their focus on defining certain attributes of God – kindness and love in Christianity; justice and strength in Islam – is still a form of idolatry.
It can be said that Christianity learned from Judaism the values of kindness and love which are powerful and creative forces. However, Christianity rejected the the values of justice and law, and consequently the unique mission of the Jews and their fulfillment of the commandments to improve the world. Therefore, it became impossible to actualize the idea of kindness within the reality of the world as it is. Christianity then became largely dismissive of this world, since perfecting it requires justice and law.
Christianity presents an additional problem by personifying God in the physical form of a human. This distortion of imagining God not as one, but as a trinity, defies the purity of God's exclusivity and monotheistic values. Over the course of history even the Christian value of love which it heralded became distorted. Often Christianity corrupted its central value of love by acting with zealous cruelty toward non-Christians.
Approximately five hundred years ago, the Protestant movement was founded to return Christianity to its biblical roots. Protestantism waged war to remove images and icons from its churches while they can still be found in Catholic and Orthodox churches. Yet even the Protestants have not internalized the change required to reject defining God as human.
Islam learned the values of divine strength and justice from Judaism. This includes obedience to God commands and willingness to keep His laws. However, its grand essential vision is incomplete. Since Islam came into existence well after Christianity, it succeeded in freeing itself from idols and images. Yet, since it did not preserve a direct link to the Torah of Israel, Islam contains an idolatrous element. It reduces the divine to dictates revealed to people from above and they be accepted with respect and submission, and imposed upon all humanity by force and coercion. Islam does not recognize the tremendous divine value of free choice and the range of human creativity in all its complexity. This creativity is actually divine revelation that is discovered and developed by humans who were created in God's image.[1]
[1] I would suggest that the difference between Christianity and Islam stems from the distinct lessons they learned from the Jews. Christianity developed in the period before the destruction of the Second Temple. On the one hand, it was inspired by the vision of the Jewish people living in its land with the Temple, a vision of great potential. On the other hand, it was struck by a sense of failure that the divine presence and observance of mitzvot failed to improve this world. As a result, Christianity adopted the attitude that humanity and the earth are fundamentally flawed and the only way to achieve forgiveness is to find refuge in the kingdom of heaven. In contrast, Islam developed several hundred years after the destruction of the Second Temple, during a time when the Jews were scattered in exile and had become more narrowly focused on studying Jewish law. Consequently, on the one hand, Islam was less inspired than Christianity by Judaism’s vision, but on the other, it focused more on law and practical behavior, and did not personify God.
