The plain Hebrew says Aaron took the gold from the people's hands, fashioned it with a tool, and made a molten calf. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds a single phrase that changes the scene: "he took them from their hands, and bound them in a wrapper, and wrought it with a tool, having made a molten calf" (Exodus 32:4).
The wrapper — the sudar, a cloth bundle — is an unexpected detail. The sages asked why it was mentioned at all. The answer that emerged in the midrashic tradition (Tanchuma Ki Tisa 19, c. 700 CE) is extraordinary. Aaron bound the gold in a cloth so that it would not be clear whose hands had done the work. He wanted the calf to emerge, if possible, as if no one had made it.
The deeper midrash makes the claim sharper still. When Aaron cast the gold into the fire, the magicians of the mixed multitude — the erev rav who had come up with Israel from Egypt — used their sorcery to make the calf emerge alive. It walked. It moved. The people cried, "These, Israel, are thy gods, which brought thee forth from the land of Mizraim" — because the thing before them appeared to be no mere statue.
Why did Aaron participate at all?
This is the question the sages could not stop asking. The answer the targum implies — and which we will see explicitly in the next verse — is that Aaron had already watched his nephew Hur killed by the mob when Hur resisted. Aaron was playing for time, not for the calf. He bound the gold slowly. He delayed. He hoped Moses would return before the ritual began.
The tragedy is that his delay did not stop the disaster. It only delayed it.
The Maggid takes this home: sometimes our compromises are stalling tactics, hoping for rescue. Sometimes rescue comes. Sometimes it does not, and our stalling becomes part of the story of the sin.