With What Face Can We Possibly Come Back to God

Most people think the hardest part of coming back to God is wanting to. The rabbis of Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, a Palestinian collection of festival sermons compiled by the seventh century, knew better. The hardest part is the shame. And they put that shame in the mouth of a whole nation that wanted to return and could not lift its eyes.

God gives Jeremiah one instruction. Go and tell Israel to turn back. Simple enough. The prophet goes. He delivers it. And the people do not argue, do not scoff, do not walk away. They freeze.

How can we even face Him

"Our master Jeremiah," they say, "with what face do we come before the Omnipresent? We angered Him. We provoked Him. And the worst of it is that the evidence is still standing." In this retelling of the people's shame, the rabbis press on a detail that makes repentance feel impossible. The mountains where Israel burned offerings to idols are still there. The hills are still there. You cannot bury what you did when the monuments to it rise on the horizon every morning. "On the tops of the mountains they sacrifice" (Hosea 4:13). Let us lie down in our shame, the people say, and let our disgrace cover us like a blanket.

This is not stubbornness. It is the specific paralysis of someone who knows exactly what they did and cannot imagine being looked at again. Jeremiah carries the answer back up to heaven, the way a child carries a parent's refusal back to a sibling.

The threat that was never carried out

God answers twice, through two sages, and the two answers are not the same.

Rabbi Levi's God reaches for the Torah and reads His own law aloud. "I will set My face against that man and cut him off from the midst of his people" (Leviticus 20:6). That is the sentence for idolatry. The face of God turned against you, and then erasure. Have I done that to you, God asks Jeremiah. Tell them. The decree was real. The threat was written down in black letters where anyone could find it. And it was never carried out. "I will not cause My face to fall upon you, for I am loving, says the LORD. I will not bear a grudge forever" (Jeremiah 3:12). The God who could have cut them off is telling them, through a prophet, that He chose not to.

Who is it you think you are returning to

Rabbi Yitzchak's God answers the question of shame with a question of His own. When you come back to Me, who do you imagine is waiting? Not a stranger. Not a magistrate sharpening a verdict. "For I have become a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn" (Jeremiah 31:9). The people had pictured a sealed door and a judge behind it. God describes a parent who never once stopped calling them His own child, even while the smoke from the idol-mountains was still rising. You are not asking for an audience. You are coming home.

The wise servant and the woman who turned

To understand why God chose Jeremiah to carry this, the same collection opens the prophet's book with a proverb. "A wise servant shall rule over a son who acts shamefully" (Proverbs 17:2). Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin reads it as a portrait. The wise servant is Jeremiah. The shameful son is Israel, the people who disgraced themselves chasing idols.

Then Rabbi Abba bar Kahana draws a comparison that should sting. By tradition Jeremiah descended from Rahab, the woman of Jericho who hid the spies and turned to God. So let the child of the corrupt woman who mended her ways rebuke the child of the upright woman who ruined hers. Verse against verse, the rabbis set Rahab's record beside Israel's. Rahab swore truly by the LORD; Israel swore falsely. Rahab begged to keep her father and mother alive; in Israel parents were treated with contempt. Rahab went up to the roof to save two men; Israel went up to the rooftops to bow to the stars. Rahab hid the spies among stalks of wood; Israel said to a block of wood, "You are my father" (Jeremiah 2:27). "Everything written of Israel for disgrace," the sages conclude, "is written of Rahab for praise." The descendant of a prostitute who repented is now the cleanest mouth in the room, sent to call the chosen nation home. It is the kind of inversion that runs all through the midrashic-aggadah tradition, where the outsider keeps shaming the insider.

How long will you love scoffing

And there is the deeper diagnosis, drawn from yet another sermon in the same collection. It opens with Proverbs spoken like an exhausted parent. "How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity, and scoffers delight in their scoffing?" (Proverbs 1:22). Rabbi Shimon ben Nezirah finds the wound in it with a kitchen image. Eat spoiled food for two or three days and your stomach revolts on its own; the body knows to reject what is rotten. So how, after generation upon generation of serving idols, has Israel's soul not turned away from a thing Scripture itself tells you to throw out like filth, saying to it, "Get out" (Isaiah 30:22)?

Rabbi Yudan warns where mockery leads. Its beginning is chastisement, its end is destruction. First the bonds tighten, then the ruin already decreed arrives. But the verse refuses to end there. "Turn back at my reproof, and I will pour out my spirit to you" (Proverbs 1:23). The rabbis hear two roads in that line. If Israel returns, God's spirit pours out through the visions of Ezekiel. If they refuse, the words still come, but as the hard rebukes of Jeremiah. The prophet will speak either way. The only thing left to Israel is which voice they will hear, comfort or correction.

So picture the people again, lying down in their shame with the idol-mountains framed in the doorway. They had it exactly backward. They thought the question was whether God would still take them. The question was only ever whether they would believe a Father who was already standing there with the door open.