Ask the Rabbi with Rabbi Chaim Mintz
Before bringing the Great Flood (Mabul), God declared that man is so evil that He regrets having created him. Since God knows everything that will happen, why did He create the world in the first place, if He knew it wouldn’t work?
Rabbi Chaim Mintz responds:
God does not have regrets. Although the Torah uses expressions that describe God having a change of heart, they are just allegorical, based on human ways of interacting, simply because that is all a human being can comprehend. What it really means is that God is doing something to counteract His previous action. He created the world and then, because of the evil in the world, He made a decision to destroy it with a flood. To us it may seem as though God undoing His action is like our regret, in which we think, “Oh, no, what did I do?” But in truth it is merely a description of God’s response to our actions. The same is true when we mention any “feelings” of God. When we say that He loves or becomes angry or jealous, we are just using words that humans can relate to, a description of God’s response to our actions, described in our terms.
In Short: When discussing God’s “feelings,” these concepts are figurative, descriptions of God, described in our terms.
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