Bring Back God's Wife!
It really looks as though originally the God YHWH had a wife: Asherah, Queen of Heaven, She Who Treads the Sea. We see her as late as the time of Jeremiah:
Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven!
Jeremiah does not like this at all. No division in the godhead allowed. No female principles in the godhead wanted.
He and his theological allies changed Judaism, ripping YHWH's wife out of the religion: no more Queen of Heaven. (Later on the Yeshuan Heresy was to bring the Queen of Heaven back, kinda-sorta, but that is another story...)
Now comes Jeffrey Goldberg, continuing his snitfest against Alison Benedikt, this time for daring to alter the Haggadah:
Who is the Wicked Son?: Benedikt linked, in this repellent rebuttal, to an Amazon page featuring all manner of Haggadot, ostensibly to prove that all sorts of people write their own seder service. This, of course, is true, but what people generally don't do is "delete" the unpleasant bits. They explain and analyze them, but they don't delete. I wanted to make sure I was correct in thinking that Benedikt was doing something un-Jewish by deleting sections of the Haggadah...
Seems to me that it is the essence of all religions to change over time. It is what they do. And to say that those who are changing a religion at the margins are not of it--well, that strikes me as the kind of behavior that the story of the Wicked Son is designed to warn against...
