After the man and the woman eat and hide, HaShem walks in the garden in the cool of the day and speaks one word: Ayyekah. Where are you (Genesis 3:9). He is not gathering information. He knows exactly where they are. The question is not for His sake but for theirs. It is the voice of a Father walking through a suddenly quiet garden, calling for children who used to come running.

The Hebrew opens a door the translations close. The consonants of ayyekah, the bare letters of where are you, are the same consonants that open the saddest scroll in the Tanakh: eichah, How, the first word and the Hebrew name of the book of Lamentations, the cry HaShem raises over a ruined Jerusalem. The grief over the fallen city is already hidden inside the Father's first question to His hiding children. Ayyekah is not a gavel. It is grief going looking. And the whole rest of Scripture is HaShem walking into every age, asking the same question. Where are you. Come home.