Hennie Silverman asks the following question-aren't the keruvim avoda zarah? We aren' t supposed to make idols or figures and the keruvim are gold figures with faces so how is that allowed?
Your question is so good that it bothered gedolim of the past. It is addressed by two great Spanish rishonim who lived 350 years apart, R. Yehudah ha-Levi (1075-1141; author of Sefer ha-Kuzari), and R. Yitzchak Abarbanel (1437-1508).
In an important passage in which he addresses the sin of the Golden Calf (Kuzari I:97), R. Yehudah ha-Levi gives the mashal of a foolish person who goes into a pharmacy and mixes up some medications to take. In a pharmacist’s hands, those medicines heal, but in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, they are poisons. Similarly, Hashem has told us not to make idols or worship images even if we are doing it to worship Him, and if we make images on our own (such as the Golden Calf) then it is spiritual poison. But if He commands us to worship Him by building keruvim, then the keruvim are spiritual medicine.
Abarbanel asks your question almost exactly the same way you did in his commentary to Parashat Terumah (page 239, second question) – how do the keruvim not violate the Second Commandment? He explains at length that each aspect of the mishkan was constructed as a symbol of a moral/spiritual idea. On page 252 he writes specifically about the keruvim. The keruvim, which looked like a boy and a girl, are meant to remind Bnei Yisrael that every man and woman should, from his or her childhood, constantly think about Hashem and Torah. Since they were built not for worship at all, but to serve as a symbolic reminder of Bnei Yisrael’s ideal behavior, they are not avodah zarah.
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