"Do not be hasty with your words, and let your heart not rush to bring a matter before God" (Ecclesiastes 5:1). Jacob had said: "My way is hidden from the Lord." The rabbis found this hasty. Not wrong, exactly — the exile was real, the suffering was real, the forgetting felt real. But Job had already established the danger of rushing to judgment against God: "If he insisted on a trial with Him, He would not answer one charge in a thousand" (Job 9:3).
The Holy One says to Jacob, in the midrash's imagined dialogue: "If so, why complain? Have you ever asked for something and not received it? Have you ever come to Me in prayer and been turned away?" The questions are not rhetorical in the dismissive sense — they are invitations to remember the actual record. The patriarchs asked. God answered. The whole history of the covenant is a record of petition and response. Jacob, who had seen angels ascending and descending, who had wrestled with a divine being and been renamed, was rushing to the worst interpretation of his circumstances.
The midrash is not saying Jacob was wrong to feel abandoned. It is saying he was wrong to say it without checking his premises first. (Proverbs 29:20) warns: "You have seen a man who is hasty with his words — there is more hope for a fool than for him." The person who controls their tongue, who holds the complaint in until they are sure of the ground beneath it, is the person who can then speak from a place of genuine authority. Jacob had that authority. He was using it before it was earned.