A Roman emperor once told Rabban Gamliel: "Your God is a thief. He put Adam to sleep and stole one of his ribs." Before Rabban Gamliel could answer, his daughter interrupted. According to Sanhedrin 39a, she said: "Give me a military commander. Bandits broke into our house last night. They took a silver jug and left a golden one."
The emperor was puzzled. "If bandits exchanged silver for gold, I wish such bandits would come every night." His daughter replied: "Then was it not good for Adam that God took a rib and gave him a wife to serve him?"
The emperor pressed: "Fine—but why did God take the rib while Adam was asleep? Why not do it openly?" The daughter asked for a piece of raw meat. She placed it under hot coals, roasted it, and offered it to her father. "Eat this," she said. The emperor refused—watching the raw meat being prepared made it repulsive. "Exactly," she said. "If God had formed Eve in front of Adam, she would have been repulsive to him."
The same passage addresses God's grief over destruction. When wicked Ahab was killed, "the song went throughout the camp" (I Kings 22:36). But does God celebrate the death of the wicked? Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani said no. At the splitting of the Red Sea, when the angels tried to sing, God silenced them: "My handiwork is drowning in the sea, and you are reciting a song?"
The Talmud asks: if God does not rejoice at the fall of the wicked, what does (Proverbs 11:10) mean—"When the wicked perish, there is song"? The answer: God does not sing. Others may. But the distinction matters. Divine justice is executed with sorrow, not triumph. Even the destruction of evil is, for God, a form of mourning.