In shul this morning, I was musing on this passage from Genesis 8:21, which was in the parsha, or Torah portion, we read for the week:

…the Lord said to Himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.”

This statement comes just after the Flood has ended. God commands Noah to leave the ark, to take all the animals with him. Noah does that and then makes an offering to God. God is pleased by the offering, and suddenly—out of nowhere—makes this resolution: I won’t do this again. I won’t drown the world, destroy its ways (“So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease”) or its beings, again.

This is no sudden moment of humanitarianism on God’s part. There’s not even a hint of regret or remorse in the passage. But it is an acknowledgment on God’s part, a resolution born of a sad realization, that the Flood was a mistake. Born of a very wrong-headed idea.

The original idea of the Flood was not to destroy all of creation, to rid God of God’s work. If that were the case, why tell Noah to build an ark for him and his family and the animals? No, the idea was to destroy all that part of creation that was evil and wicked and tainted—but to separate and save a remnant of goodness that would be the seed of a new civilization.

The destruction of the Flood, in other words, was violence of a particular and familiar kind: a purifying, separating violence of the sort we so often see in ethnic cleansing or genocide. Get rid of the stain, which can be located in a specific people or place, separate the remnant from that stain, and you can begin again, with goodness and virtue and purity.

What is God’s realization? It doesn’t work. Stains are everywhere, evil is everywhere, you can’t murder your way to goodness, you can’t purify through violence. Other ways must be found, other means are necessary. This isn’t an argument against political violence or even violence, which have their strategic uses. It’s an argument against the notion that violence can purify, that violence can make a people spiritually, morally, whole.

The ethnic cleansing/genocide comparison came to me while reading another passage in Genesis, not long before this one. It’s just before the Flood begins. Noah has built the ark, as God commanded. He’s gathered all manner of animal and his family. And then God commands them to go in. It’s not clear if they go up or down into the ark; if they ascend or descend. But in they go, silently as far as we know, two by two. The passage ends with this terrible sentence:

And the Lord shut them in.

I had never thought it before, but the passage reminded me of descriptions of Jews going into the gas chambers. There’s a particularly visual moment I had in mind from the movie Denial, about the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt who is sued for libel by David Irving. In one scene, Lipstadt and her attorney travel to Auschwitz on a research mission, and as they’re looking around Auschwitz, they come upon a gas chamber, which is preceded by a long downward ramp. Something people would walk down and from which they would enter the chamber, where they would then be shut in.

For some reason, the passage I read, culminating in “the Lord shut them in,” called that scene to mind. Only in the Bible, the genocide works in reverse: those who are shut in the ark are saved; everyone else is destroyed.

If the comparison offends or horrifies you, I completely understand. I was jarred by it myself; it made me uncomfortable. And I don’t raise it to be provocative or to over-share a thought better kept to myself. Because the more I thought about it, the more the resonances between the Flood and the Final Solution, between Noah and Shoah, came.

So it’s clear, as I said, that God knows the Flood was a mistake, on a massive scale. And it’s a mistake, as I said, born of this terrible idea: that you can murder your way to purity, that you can remove the stain by separating out a part of a people and destroying the rest. This is why, immediately following that realization, God makes a covenant with Noah. Every time it rains, there will be a rainbow: a sign of God’s promise that God will never again destroy the earth by flood (or other measures, the passage seems to suggest). This is the famous “rainbow sign,” which figures in that couplet from a black spiritual—God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time—that gave the title to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

(How we square that promise from God with the multiple mass murders and cleansings that follow in the Bible—from Sodom and Gommorah to the Israelites slaughtering the Canaanites—is another story.)

But after God makes this promise, we come to the Tower of Babel story. That story, I would argue, is an epilogue to the story of the Flood. It is about humanity’s own encounter with the very impulse that God has just indulged and then renounced.

The men and women who build the Tower of Babel are not unlike God in the Flood. Traditional interpretations see that imitation of God as the sin, the wrong, at the heart of the Tower of Babel story. The men and women who built the tower, the argument goes, were inspired by hubris, they wanted to be as high as God, and so on.

But read against the Flood, the Tower of Babel suggests a different interpretation: the sin was not wanting to be like God. The sin was to repeat the same mistake God had just made with the Flood: that is, wanting to purify your way to unity by separating yourselves from the rest of humanity.

Upon seeing the Tower, God notes:

Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language;

God serves here not as a judge but as a witness, as a narrator or stand-in for the reader. God observes here, for us, that the people’s oneness is the problem. (There’s a different interpretation of this passage, which focuses on how separation and division make collective action and solidarity impossible, but I want to set that aside for another day.) The people have built their way, have cloistered themselves, into oneness. It’s true that no violence is mentioned in the story, but our rabbi in shul today told us of an ancient midrash or commentary that says that in the building of the Tower, the men and women cared more about the bricks than the workers who built it. So the workers would fall from the height and no one would notice or care, but a brick would fall, and all would wail and weep. In their aspiration for wholeness and unity via separation, a holy unity that would mimic the moral purity and perfection of heaven precisely because it was so removed from the rest of the earth—”let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth”—the people of the Tower willingly countenanced all manner of murder and mayhem. Not unlike what God did in the Flood.

And how does God deal with that desire for purification by separation, that violence that they countenance on their way to unity?

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth:

God establishes plurality, the multiplicity of peoples, the varieties of culture and language, as a condition of the world. Not as a punishment for hubris, I would argue, not as a punishment for seeking improvement or even working toward utopia, but as a reminder and a reaffirmation of what God came to realize after the Flood: purification by violence, moral wholeness by separation, final solutions—none of these is an answer to the condition of the world. They are, in fact, an assault on the condition of the world.

This, as Hannah Arendt recognized in her famous epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem, was the Nazis’ great crime, the crime for which Eichmann should hang. “And just as you,” she imagines a court telling Eichmann,

supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.