Considering the biblical story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai to find the Israelites worshipping an idol, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes:
On the top of the mountain, God informs Moses what has just happened at its base: “Go on down, for your people, whom you have brought out from the land of Egypt, have acted basely” (Exodus 32:7). God’s words . . . bring Moses a dreadful revelation: in his people’s eyes, he has become an idol, his charisma symbolizing nothing other than itself. The people have known all too well exactly what they needed. He has failed to represent the infinite, to stir their imagination. . . . They have inflated him and at the same time vulgarized him.
In his absence, he has been replaced by the even more vulgar fascination of a golden calf: “They have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them. They have made themselves a molten calf and bowed low to it and sacrificed to it, saying: ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt’” (Exodus 32:8). Using the same formula again, God ironically points up the essential problem. Beyond all the rites of idolatry—the actual making of the calf, the worship, and the sacrifices—there is what the people are saying, what they are thinking: the calf is the new object of adoration, filling the vacuum left by Moses himself. . . .
In endowing him with too much power, they have surrendered to their desire for fetish objects. The immediacy with which they replace him with the calf seems to indicate that it serves the same psychic purpose. Unhesitatingly, they substitute for the man Moses a hackneyed object of adoration.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/218375/idolizing-moses