The Desire to Entrap God

On Sinai an anthropological, cultural, social and epochal revolution took place. There, humanity has reached a new stage in its process of humanization, thanks to a religious experience that was radically different from that of the other peoples, with their simple gods or dumb idols of wood. But at the foot of that mountain there also took place what was the biggest crisis of the people that had come out on a journey to the promised land, and it contains an extraordinary teaching on the most serious disease of every religious experience or ideal: its reduction to idolatry. The transformation of YHWH in a golden bull is a strong message addressed to all those people, communities, institutions that are given a “charisma”, all those that were once reached and inhabited by a voice that called them to a task and announced them a different and larger promise. In these experiences and in these people there is always a powerful appeal to resize and normalize the call and the promise, to reduce the mystery to trivial evidence. It is a charm-temptation that acts and operates throughout life, and becomes particularly tenacious in the last phase of it.