Or HaChaim on Exodus 32:20/אור החיים על שמות ל״ב:כ׳

1 ויקח את העגל אשר עשו, He took the calf which they had made, etc. The words "which they had made" appear quite superfluous; perhaps the Torah had to mention this according to the view that the golden calf looked like a calf from the front and like a donkey when viewed from the rear as we find in the Zohar volume 2 page 192. If the Torah had written only "he took the calf," I could have understood this as a reference only to the front section of the calf and that Moses burned only that section of the image. By adding the words: "which they had made," the Torah makes it clear that Moses burned the entire inert creature.

2Perhaps the lesson in these words is similar to the message of the prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah, 2,19: "your wickedness itself has become your affliction;" i.e. the sin itself becomes the bane of the person who perpetrated it. By embracing evil, the sin itself destroys those who love it and who hate sanctity. When the Torah speaks of אשר עשו, it refers to the consequences of the act of making the calf. וישק את בני ישראל, he made the Israelites drink of it. This was designed to open the eyes of the blind and to teach them to hate evil and to love sanctity which implies a love for the good for goodness' own sake.

3Furthermore, the Torah may have wanted to inform us about the nature of the evil the two sorcerers had perpetrated. The first evil was that they formed the golden calf, the second that the calf invited the people to worship it when it said: "these are your gods O Israel, etc." The Torah tells us that Moses "took" i.e. seized both these aspects of wickedness the sorcerers had created. The expression לקח as a description of sanctity gaining control over spiritually negative forces, קליפה, is used by the Talmud in Yuma 69 where the members of the Great Assembly are described as seizing the spirit which seduces men into worshiping idols and other sins, and their trying to eliminate it. Moses did something similar here when he "seized" the spirit of impurity within the golden calf, and burned it. The words וישרוף באש, "he burned it in fire," are far more appropriate when applied to the spirit within the calf than to the calf itself seeing that one cannot "burn" gold. Perhaps this is the mystical dimension of Isaiah 11,4 where the prophet describes the Messiah as "killing the wicked with the breath of his lips."