A word of Torah:    

        Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
                                     From the movie Shawshank Redemption
 
         This week, we read the story of Hagar and Ishmael being sent away by Abraham. They wander in the desert and run out of water. Hagar is certain that both of them will die. In response to this crisis, Hagar gives up and moves, as the text says, a bowshot away from her child (harheik kim’takhavei keshet) so as not to witness his death. Hagar weeps in hopeless despair.
        Yet when God responds, it is not to Hagar, for the text tells us God responds to the cry of the child ba-asher hu sham—where he is at---that is God responds to the child and to the needs of the moment—not to the emotional despair of Hagar. But then sensing something Hagar lifts her eyes and sees a sustaining well of water which presumably was always there right before her but blinded by despair she could not see it.
        It is Ishmael who understands that in the face of a bleak situation, you need to search for the possibilities of what might be. The text continues: “and God was with the boy and he grew up.”  Where does Ishmael grow up? The text continues va-yeshev be-midbar---Ishmael grew up in the desert, not in the Promised Land or the Garden of Eden but in the desert. And how did he respond to the difficulties and challenges of the desert? Va-yehi roveh kashat—he became a bowman. This phrase should resonate with us—a few verses before Hagar distances herself from Ishmael the length of a bow shot, and now the grown-up Ishmael becomes a bowman.
        For Ishmael is one who crosses, who bridges the distance between what is and what could be. He will not be Abraham’s heir—his path will take him elsewhere--but he knows not only how to survive but how to live in the desert of his life. How to face disappointments, defeats and losses. For the bow evokes the rainbow, the sign of the covenant after the Flood, suggesting that like a rainbow, life is unexpected and fragile and yet multicolored and beautiful. Seemingly unnecessarily, the verse repeats the same words again to make sure we understand what Ishmael understood even as a child ---the verse repeats va-yeishev be-midbar –and he lived in the desert--to remind us that he really did live---a life of meaning filled with disappointments and with triumphs in the desert.
        We this week will wander in that desert looking and hoping for a well of sustaining waters. Kein yehi ratzon—so may it be.