“The evil inclination of idolatry is thus the outcome of a conflict between the deep need for religion, faith, and serving God, and the human difficulty of creating a relationship with an abstraction.
This conflict, this tension, is what creates the temptation to satisfy the longing for the divine with something perverse—that is, by means of idolatry, cultic ritual, and devotion to something simpler and easier for human beings.
It is thus that the urge towards faith takes the form of idolatry”
--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From We Jews, p. 136, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
