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With What Face Can We Possibly Come Back to God

Israel wanted to repent but could not lift its eyes. The mountains where they had burned offerings to idols still stood on the horizon every morning.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Message Jeremiah Could Not Deliver
  2. The One Word That Broke Them Open
  3. The Parable of the Wise Servant
  4. Rahab and What She Trusted
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The Message Jeremiah Could Not Deliver

God gave Jeremiah one instruction. Simple enough to carry in a single sentence. Go, tell Israel to turn back.

The prophet went. He delivered it. And the people did something that surprised him: they did not argue, did not mock, did not walk away. They froze. They stood with the message in their ears and their eyes on the ground and they said something that the sages of Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, the Palestinian festival homilies compiled by the seventh century, heard as the most honest thing a people has ever said to a prophet.

Our master Jeremiah. With what face do we come before the Omnipresent?

Not: we don't want to. Not: we don't believe the return is possible. But: we know what our faces look like to Him. We know what we did. And the worst of it is that the evidence is still standing. The mountains where we burned offerings to idols are still there. The hills are still there. Every morning we walk out of our houses and look up and there they are, the places where we did what we did, sitting on the horizon and refusing to disappear. "Let us lie down in our shame," the people said, "and let our disgrace cover us like a blanket." At least a blanket is something to hide under.

The One Word That Broke Them Open

Jeremiah carried the people's answer back to God. Here is what they said. Here is the shame that is holding them still. And God's response, in this tradition, is a single word that the Pesikta took apart with the precision of a surgeon.

"Return," God said. The Hebrew word for return, shuv, is also the word for repentance in the deepest sense. But the tradition heard something else in how it was deployed here. Not a command. A declaration. "I have already returned to you. Come find me where I am."

God did not wait for the people to work up the courage to approach. He moved first. He placed himself in the direction of their turning. And the image the sages found for this was the one that broke the paralysis open: "I am like a father. When a father sees his son coming down the road, even at a distance, even filthy from where he has been, the father runs. The son is still calculating whether he deserves to arrive. The father has already arrived at him."

The Parable of the Wise Servant

The sages told a second story alongside the first to make the logic precise. A king had a servant who had failed him badly. The servant knew it. He had been present at the failure and had no argument in his defense and had not tried to construct one. He stood outside the palace with his eyes on the ground, knowing the king was inside, knowing the door was there, and could not make himself go through it.

A wise man happened past. He went inside, found the king, and said: "your servant is outside. He wants to come back. He cannot come in because he cannot face you." The king sent the messenger back out with one instruction: "tell him I have already forgiven him. Come in."

The servant came in. Not because the shame was gone. Because the king had moved first and the calculation had changed. The mathematics of return, in this tradition, do not require the penitent to achieve a courage they do not have. They require only that God's prior movement be communicated. The messenger's job is to carry that communication without editing it or hedging it or adding conditions the king did not add.

Rahab and What She Trusted

The same homiletic tradition in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana circled back to Rahab of Jericho as a counterpoint. Rahab had done the one unambiguous righteous act of her life, hiding the Israelite spies in her house, and she had done it for a reason she stated plainly: "I know the LORD has given you the land. I know what He did to the Egyptians. I know what He did to the kings of the Amorites. Your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below."

Rahab was not a woman who had kept the commandments. She had not prayed the right prayers or made the right offerings or lived in the right place. She had done one thing: she had heard the report and believed it, and when the moment came she acted on what she believed. And the tradition preserved her name as the ancestor of prophets, as a woman whose single act of trust carried more weight than years of obedience without that quality of trust underneath it.

The sages placed Rahab in the same homily as the people of Israel standing paralyzed in their shame because the pairing was intentional. Rahab had nothing to stand on. Israel, paralyzed by shame, thought it had nothing to stand on. But the comparison was the argument: the one who acts from what small trust she has is closer to the door than the one who waits for the shame to lift on its own.

Pesikta De Rav KahanaRepentanceProphecyIdolatry
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From the tradition

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The texts behind this telling. Some cards carry a translation of the source; others are our own retelling of it, and each card says which. Every card links out to the original.

Pesikta DeRav Kahana 24:16Pesikta de-Rav Kahana

Translation of the source text.Pesikta de Rav Kahana according to an Oxford manuscript, Dov Mandelbaum ed., N.Y. 1987 · CC-BY

Rabbi Levi and Rabbi Yitzchak. Rabbi Levi said: The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Jeremiah, Go and tell Israel to repent. He came and told them, and they said to him, Our master Jeremiah, how can we repent? With what face do we come before the Omnipresent? Have we not angered Him and provoked Him? Those very mountains and hills where we worshiped idols still stand, as it says, On the tops of the mountains they sacrifice (Hosea 4:13). Let us lie down in our shame, and let our disgrace cover us (Jeremiah 3:25). He came before the Holy One, blessed be He, and said so. He said to him, Go and tell them: Have I not written this for you in My Torah, And I will set My face against that man and cut him off from the midst of his people (Leviticus 20:6)? Have I done such a thing to you? Rather, 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).

Rabbi Yitzchak said: The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Jeremiah, Go and tell Israel to repent. He came and told them, and they said to him, Our master Jeremiah, how can we repent? With what face do we come before the Holy One? Have we not angered and provoked Him? Those mountains and hills where we worshiped idols still stand, as it says, On the tops of the mountains they sacrifice (Hosea 4:13). Let us lie down in our shame (Jeremiah 3:25). He came and said this before the Holy One, blessed be He. He said to him, Go and tell them: If you are coming, are you not coming to your Father in heaven? As it says, For I have become a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn (Jeremiah 31:9).

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Pesikta DeRav Kahana 13:4Pesikta de-Rav Kahana

Translation of the source text.Pesikta de Rav Kahana according to an Oxford manuscript, Dov Mandelbaum ed., N.Y. 1987 · CC-BY

Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin in the name of Rabbi Levi opened: "A wise servant shall rule over a son who acts shamefully, and shall share the inheritance among the brothers" (Proverbs 17:2). "A wise servant" - this is Jeremiah. "Shall rule over a son who acts shamefully" - this is Israel, who shamed themselves before idolatry.

Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said: It is written, "You were not even like a harlot, scorning hire" (Ezekiel 16:31). Let the child of the corrupt woman who mended her deeds come and reprove the child of the upright woman who corrupted her deeds. You find that everything written of Israel for disgrace is written of Rahab for praise. Of Rahab it is written, "Now then, swear to me by the LORD" (Joshua 2:12), and of Israel it is written, "surely they swear falsely" (Jeremiah 5:2). Of Rahab it is written, "and you shall keep alive my father and my mother" (Joshua 2:13), and of Israel it is written, "father and mother are treated with contempt in you" (Ezekiel 22:7). Of Rahab it is written, "and she brought them up to the roof" (Joshua 2:6), and of Israel it is written, "and those who bow on the rooftops to the host of heaven" (Zephaniah 1:5). Of Rahab it is written, "and she hid them with the stalks of flax" (Joshua ibid.), and of Israel it is written, "who say to the wood, You are my father" (Jeremiah 2:27). Of Rahab it is written, "and she said to them, Get to the hills" (Joshua 2:16), and of Israel it is written, "on the tops of the mountains they sacrifice" (Hosea 4:13). Of Rahab it is written, "and give me a true sign" (Joshua 2:12), and of Israel it is written, "and they do not speak truth" (Jeremiah 9:4). Thus everything written of Israel for disgrace is written of Rahab for praise.

"And shall share the inheritance among the brothers" (Proverbs ibid.) - this is Jeremiah. It is written of him, "And Jeremiah went out of Jerusalem to go" (Jeremiah 37:12). Rav said: He went out to take his portion. Rabbi Binyamin ben Levi said: To the encampment there. There are many prophecies; "the prophecy of Jeremiah" is not written here, but rather "the words of Jeremiah." Therefore Scripture requires "The words of Jeremiah" (Jeremiah 1:1).

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Pesikta DeRav Kahana 13:2Pesikta de-Rav Kahana

Translation of the source text.Pesikta de Rav Kahana according to an Oxford manuscript, Dov Mandelbaum ed., N.Y. 1987 · CC-BY

Rabbi Acha opened: "How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity, and scoffers delight in their scoffing?" (Proverbs 1:22). Rabbi Shimon ben Nezirah said: It is the way of the world that a person eats foul-smelling food for two or three days and his soul is sickened by it. You - how many years have you been serving idolatry, the very thing of which it is written "You shall say to it, Get out" (Isaiah 30:22), [a thing fit only for] filth you say to it, and yet your soul is not turned away from it?

Rabbi Yudan said: Two men prophesied about scoffing, and these are they - Solomon and Isaiah. Solomon said, "and scoffers delight in their scoffing" (Proverbs ibid.), and Isaiah said, "And now, do not scoff, lest your bonds be made strong" (Isaiah 28:22). Rabbi Pinchas and Rabbi Yirmiah in the name of Rabbi Shmuel bar Rav Yitzchak: Harsh is scoffing, for its beginning is chastisements and its end is destruction. Its beginning is chastisements, "lest your bonds be made strong" (ibid.); and its end is destruction, "for I have heard of a destruction utterly determined" (ibid.).

"Turn back at my reproof; behold, I will pour out my spirit to you, I will make my words known to you" (Proverbs 1:23). If you turn back at my reproof, I will pour out my spirit to you, by the hand of Ezekiel - "The word of the LORD came indeed to Ezekiel son of Buzi the priest" (Ezekiel 1:3). And if not, "I will make my words known to you" (Proverbs ibid.), by the hand of Jeremiah. Therefore Scripture needs to say, "The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah" (Jeremiah 1:1).

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