Opinion: But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I recently took my son to shul in his new jacket, the one that never made it back home. Out of fear of my wife, I’ve been desperately trying to recall in which shul — out of the many I frequent — that the jacket might be in. Last week I went to a shul office to ask if it had turned up there. As I was talking to the receptionist about the missing jacket, I looked down on the desk at a rare siddur, the same one which I owned and had misplaced 10 years ago!   I had been thinking about that siddur a few days earlier and how I missed it, so as I opened it, it was with a tinge of hopeful excitement and anxiety. I couldn’t believe my eyes: there, inside the front cover, was my contact information. After ten years and so many attempts to locate that siddur, I found it sitting on the desk in the shul’s office. The secretary told me it was about to be sent to “Gniza” (burial). If not for the lost jacket I wouldn’t have retrieved the lost siddur. As for the jacket, I haven’t found it yet, though I hope to do so within this decade, as my son is sure to outgrow it well before 2020. That said, we returned home this past Sunday to find a bag hanging on the door. It was a beautiful jacket that a friend’s son had outgrown, a godsend, but not the jacket we’d lost. Better — but not the same. Within two weeks of misplacing the jacket, I was reunited with my Siddur and my son had a great new jacket — but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.  In Parshat Vayera, Hagar and her son Yishmael are banished from the home of Avraham and Sarah in order to preserve the purity of the youthful Yitzchak. Along the way, Yishmael is dying of illness and thirst. Hashem hears his prayers and Hagar sees a well of water. The implication is that the well had already been there; she simply had not seen it. On this verse in Midrash Rabba, Rabbi Binyamin taught that everyone is deemed blind until the Holy One, blessed be He, opens a person’s eyes and allows him to see.  I’ve experienced this so many times. Something seems to have ‘vanished’ only to mysteriously resurface in my life. It’s wondrous that, at times, I actually can’t find something that might be right in front of me. Perhaps there’s no better example of this then when I’m looking for the glasses that I’m wearing. Hashem truly gives sight to the blind, as He also gives wisdom to man. It’s hard to decide which I needed more. After all, it might now have been my glasses missing at all, but some brain cells. We all spend our lives trying to find things —belongings, aspirations, talents, or ideals. The search could be to find meaning in our existence or to find a justification for our pain; to find strength of character to combat our weaknesses, or to find hope within our dreams. It may be to find the inner resolve to create the realities of our lives, or to at least find our ability to accept those realities. Maybe it’s to find the right person to connect to, or the way to connect to the right person. It may be to find a way out, or to find a way in or up.  The moral of the story could be that, whatever it is we’re looking for, we might never find it, but we may find something else, perhaps something better. And what we’re looking for might be right in front of our eyes or, in the final analysis, we may not have ever lost it in the first place. Matis Friedman lives in Woodmere, and serves as a high school rebbe in Kulanu Torah Academy. In the evenings, he learns with many of the students whom he taught in HAFTR’s fifth grade.  He can be reached at MSF1565@hotmail.com