We ask the wrong questions about the story of the Flood.

We ask how God could do such a thing. We ask how a God who is good could destroy a world. We ask how a just God could ignore the difference between perpetrator and victim in His zeal to wipe the world clean. We ask how a loving God could abandon His creation.

The right question, for anyone who knows the names Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Babi Yar is not how God could have done such a thing. The right question for those who remember is how it is that God has never been compelled to do it again.