"You would be ripped apart by tides falling straight into black hole." I'm aware of that--Larry Niven "Neutron Star". (The Puppeteers reportedly wouldn't have understood, though.) That still doesn't explain why the water bulges at the side of Earth away from the Moon, because that water would be attracted toward the Moon just as much as the rock it's next to. (There's a trivial difference in mid-ocean, where the water ranges from direct contact with the ocean floor, to a few miles above it. But that's not the same as the gravitational difference of thousands of miles between the Earth's center of mass vs. the far edge.)