What are God's characteristics?

Judaism's understanding of God's characteristics is shaped by a central tension that runs through centuries of thought: God is, on one hand, utterly beyond human comprehension, and on the other, described throughout the Hebrew scriptures in deeply personal, even emotional terms. The Torah speaks of God as compassionate, jealous, patient and just, sometimes in the same breath. The rabbis and philosophers who followed did not smooth this tension away. They leaned into it, treating it as itself a kind of spiritual truth. The idea is that reality is richer than any single category, and God more so.

One of the most influential frameworks for thinking about God's characteristics comes from medieval Jewish philosophy, particularly the work of Maimonides, the twelfth-century rabbi and thinker. He argued, carefully and at length, that we cannot really say what God is, only what God is not. To say God is "good," for instance, risks implying that goodness is a quality God possesses the way a person might possess kindness, as something separate from themselves that could in principle be absent. For Maimonides, God's goodness is not a property added on top of God's being. It is inseparable from what God is. This approach, sometimes called negative theology, asks us to strip away inadequate ideas one by one, not to arrive at a neat definition, but to cultivate a more honest, humble sense of who we are dealing with. Many people find this surprisingly liberating. It gives permission to sit with uncertainty rather than forcing God into a box.

At the same time, Jewish tradition has always held onto the fourteen attributes, or thirteen depending on how you count them, found in the book of Exodus, where God proclaims a kind of self-description to Moses after the episode of the golden calf. These include mercy, grace, patience, steadfast love and faithfulness. Crucially, the rabbis taught that these are not just descriptions of what God is, but a model for how human beings should live. When the tradition says God is compassionate, it is also saying: and so should you be. This gives the characteristics of God a practical, ethical dimension. They are not abstract theological claims. They are a way of orienting a life.

Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, takes a different angle again. It describes the divine reality through a framework of emanations, the sefirot, which are something like aspects or expressions through which the infinite God relates to and creates the world. These include qualities such as wisdom, understanding, loving-kindness, severity, beauty and sovereignty. The kabbalists were not saying God is made up of parts. They were trying to map the way the one God connects with a world of many things, and in doing so, to show that qualities like love and judgement are not contradictions in God but complementary expressions of a deeper unity. For those drawn to this tradition, it can make the divine feel textured and alive rather than distant and abstract.

What strikes many people when they engage seriously with Judaism on this question is that the tradition refuses to let you settle into a purely intellectual answer. The characteristics of God in Jewish thought are not meant to be filed away as doctrinal facts. They are meant to be wrestled with, prayed through and enacted. The Psalms, for example, speak directly and sometimes urgently to a God who feels both near and far, loving and hidden. The tradition of arguing with God, seen in figures like Abraham, Moses and Job, is not considered disrespectful. It is considered honest, even faithful. If God is truly just, then calling out what seems like injustice is a legitimate spiritual act. This relational quality, the sense that engaging with God's characteristics is itself a living practice, is one of Judaism's most distinctive and sustaining gifts.