“And God regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart.” (Genesis 6:6)
It’s kind of shocking and amazing that God—at least the Biblical character version—is said to have regrets. Surely, only someone who makes mistakes can have regrets? Or can one feel regret over that which one intended? But that would imply that something has changed, if not in the external world, than the internal one. God could not have foreseen God’s change of heart. No matter how you spin it, the Biblical text imagines God as surprised. Aristotle’s God regrets nothing. Nor does Maimonides’s. Nor does Anselm’s. A God who is supremely reasonable cannot regret. A God who is conflicted can regret.
In Hebrew, the word for regret (n-ch-m) shares an etymological root with the word for comfort. A regret is a search for comfort, born from an admission of discomfort. The Creator God depicted in Genesis is uncomfortable as a result of what God has created.
There’s Nietzschean line of thought, also shared by yogic and Stoic thinkers, that regret betrays a mistaken view of the past. One cannot regret that which one has no control over and the only thing in one’s control is the present. Or else, there is no free will at all, and so it is false humility to regret. Whatever one’s mistakes, they are simply one’s karma. To regret is to fail at amor fati.
Even in Jewish tradition, there’s an idea that through atonement one can alchemize one’s past transgressions into positive commandments! But note that the mechanism that achieves the transmutation of past evil into present good is atonement, a form of regret. Without an initial catalyst of regret, there is no change.
Can one seek to change, to improve, to grow, without some sense of regret? In a sense, not. The desire for a better future means a regret about the nature of the present. Walter Benjamin explains why revolutionaries and nostalgic traditionalists share much in common—they both feel homesick with regard to the present. They both regret the status quo.
To a presentist sensibility, regret appears as so much noise and distraction. But if the goal is to change and improve, regret seems foundational. The destructive impulse concealed in regret is also a creative one.
A person who only regrets cannot be grateful for what is. But a person who is only grateful for what is cannot seek to change anything.
For those who seek to walk in [the Biblical] God’s ways, regret is a compass. Even perfection must admit of discontent if it is to be lively.
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You can read my weekly Torah commentary here.
Thought number 1:
The tension between the transcendant God with his laundry-list of omni-properties and the personal God with His practical rationality, volitions, actions, and capacity for regret, has been troubling me lately. To will any action, to have a regret, to have anything but complete satisfaction, is to will that the world be transformed. Such a will is only coherent from within a world whose nature is impermanence. So it seems a personal God must be bound to the endless impermanent present like the rest of us. But how are we supposed to square this with the promised transcendant Omniman? Are they related to each other as parent and child? Or has God, in His personal manifestation, only forgotten Himself?
Thought Number 2:
Impermanence is a necessary condition of the will to action, but is dissatisfaction? Our will is often accompanied by desire and aversion, by dukkha, but must it be? Does an enlighetened person 'will'? My intuition is that, like a plant we may be whole, healthy, free of defect, complete in our satisfation, yet still grow. Our nature is to reconstitute ourselves through time and space, and when these give us room to grow, if we are indeed free of defect, we transform to fill it. Such transformation recruits the will -- all transformation recruits the will -- but seems empty of dukkha.