Intermediaries and Golden Calf

 Or HaChaim (Shemos 32:01) "who shall walk before us, etc.". They reasoned as follows: Seeing that G'd Himself who has taken us out of Egypt is invisible and dwells in the Celestial Regions, they were afraid that if they would encounter some evil force in the desert without some visible symbol which reassured them that G'd did indeed watch over them they might lose faith. They wished to construct some symbol of a celestial force which would remind them of G'd in Heaven. The people who initiated the golden calf did not deny for a single moment either the primacy of G'd or the fact that He had made heaven and earth. They merely wanted a go-between them and G'd  They may well have thought that the prohibition in the second commandment to having an intermediary between man and G'd was valid only while there was a Moses who was the ideal go-between. This is why they emphasised "for this man Moses, etc." Possibly, they became victims of a serious sin when they described Moses as the Power which had taken them out of Egypt,. They meant to say that even when they came out of Egypt G'd had employed a go-between and that this proved that there was nothing inherently wrong in having a go-between themselves and G'd. The fact that they referred to the go-between as, a deity, may be understood in the same sense as when G'd had told Moses in Exodus 7,1: "here I have made you in G'd's stead for Pharaoh. Obviously, the people committed a grave error as I have explained on Exodus 20,4.