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My in-laws have a koi pond in their backyard. When we visited them over Sukkot, my son Barzilai—a year and three quarters old—fell in love with it. “Peepch!” he said all weekend—wonderingly, demandingly, enthusiastically—as he dragged me to the pond’s edge to peer into it; “Peepch! Mahm! [Fish! Mayim!]” This was not the first time...

Last week’s parshah, Breshit, shows God feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse. The brand new world that was tov me’od, very good, in Genesis 1:31 suddenly appeared, by the opening verses of chapter 6, to be ra, evil. We were left on a cliffhanger—all the people are evil, God wants to blot them out, and...