When I was a child, our family rented the first floor of a gigantic Tudor-style home in Queens. The house had no back yard to speak of. There was an old shed lined with rotting leaves and a rack for drying clothes embedded in a concrete stand.
The shed was home to generations of bees. Once, when I was perhaps five years old, I was playing basketball in the driveway. A bee flew out from behind the house and hovered in the air. The bee was gigantic, about the size of a coffee cup, with gigantic wings to match.
At least, that’s what I remember. For at least the next five years, I avoided the shed of horrors. For at least the next ten years, I insisted that a species of giant bees lived in Queens, New York.
When I was about eleven years old, my friend Joanie came to visit on the day before Sukkot. We decided to build a Sukkah. We strung two parallel ropes between the house and the dreaded shed. From the ropes, we hung a series of colorful blankets. We brought out two chairs and a collapsible TV tray-table. And finally, we brought out our meal: canned tuna fish and grapes.
Within minutes, several yellow jacket wasps were checking out the meal. (The giant bee did not show up.) I was afraid, but I was not going to let the anyone drive me out of my own Sukkah! Bravely, I waved the wasps away, and Joanie and I sat down to our meal.
That was my urban Sukkot: coming to terms with nature in my tiny, concrete back yard. I will always think of Sukkot as the holiday of the bees.
Because today is Shabbat Bereisheet, you may wonder where in the creation story bees and wasps are mentioned.
Larry Lennhoff does not wonder at all.
In his blog, he says that bees were created on the fifth day.
Torah says that, on the fifth day of creation, God calls for auf to fly over the land.
But do not imagine that these are birds, Lennhoff warns. For when Noach collects species for the ark, he collects BOTH צפור (tzippor) AND עוף (auf). Since tzippor unambiguously means “bird,” auf must mean something else. At one point in the Torah Moshe speaks of locusts as sheretz auf, swarming flying things. So the creation of auf on the fifth day must be the creation of flying insects, including bees.
It is important to know where bees are included in the creation story.
Bees and wasps play a strong supporting role in Torah’s cast of characters. All characters should be accounted for in the creation story.
In Torah and Tanakh, both wasps and bees are revered as warriors. Wasps, who are insect-eating predators, are the archetypal offensive army. Bees, who serenely drink flower nectar, but guard their homes with their very lives, are the defensive army. Both are organized, cooperative, and fearless.
A new video on youtube dramatizes the Torah’s view of wasps and bees. It’s called “30 Hornets versus 30,000 Bees.” For four minutes, you can watch aggressive wasps raid a beehive, while brave bees protect the nest and each other.
In Torah, four separate times, God tells the Israelites that God will send a swarm of wasps out as an advance guard. Before the Israelite army even heads out to battle, the wasps will subdue enemies in their path. That is Torah’s view of aggressive wasps.
Torah’s view of bees is found in the book of Shoftim-Judges. The greatest of all the Judges is Devorah, whose name simply means, “the bee.” Like a honeybee, she fought when provoked, but most of the time, she kept the peace. Perhaps Devorah is not even her birth name, but an honorary nickname.
The worst of all the judges, that is, the one with the worst judgment, is Shimshon. He is foolish enough to stick his hand right into a working beehive and scoop out the honey. His lack of caution around nature’s dangerous warriors is a hint of things to come. Shimshon’s impulsivity causes many deaths, including his own.
Talmud continues Torah’s reverence for bees – but for a different reason.
From the Talmud’s perspective, it’s important to know where bees are included in the creation story because the order of creation holds some moral lessons.
Talmud teaches: Do not overestimate the importance of human beings to planetary ecology. Even insects were created before we were. Talmud means to remind us that insects could survive without us. We, however, could not survive without the ecosystem services they provide. (B. Sanhedrin 38a)
In a different passage, one sage asks the question, “Honey is produced inside the body of a non-kosher animal. How come we are allowed to eat it?” Other sages answer: Torah explicitly permits us to eat honey. And it does not give a reason. Permission to eat honey is simply a chok, a mysterious sacred ruling. (B. Berachot 7b)
In another passage, the sages discuss the beekeeper’s Shabbat. A beehive is an income-generating production facility. So it cannot even be touched on Shabbat. However, on Shabbat a beekeeper can spread a mat over the hives to protect the bees from winter rain or summer sun. (B. Beitzah 36a)
Yet another passage describes a legal dispute between next-door neighbors, a beekeeper and a mustard farmer. The beekeeper says the farmer should move the mustard, because it harms the bees. The farmer says the beekeeper should move the bees, because they keep flying into the plants and harming them. The court finds in favor of the beekeeper, stating that bees do not hurt plants. Besides, even if the bees damage some leaves, the plants regenerate – with the help of the bees. (B. Bava Batra 18b)
Obviously, Talmud recognizes the precious natural resource that bees are. They are not just property, and their value is not just economic. On Divine authority, they carry a mysterious special aura. They deserve special care even on Shabbat. They are more valuable than a year’s harvest of any crop.
Bees are only the most visible and famous of their kin, the winged and non-winged insects. If they did not pollinate plants and turn the soil, we would have very few crops at all. We would have no Shabbat of abundance. And, as biologist E.O. Wilson says, we would call out to the Divine in great pain.
Without insects, Wilson says, flowering plants and herbs would become sterile and disappear; birds and vegetarian animals would disappear; bacteria would multiply as they metabolize the rotting material; ferns, conifers and wind-pollinated grasses would spread, and then decline as the soil quality deteriorates.
And then, in Wilson’s own words:
Amid widespread starvation during the first several decades, human populations would plunge to a small fraction of their former level. The wars for control of the dwindling resources, the suffering, and the tumultuous decline to dark-age barbarism would be unprecedented in human history.
Clinging to survival in a devastated world, and trapped in an ecological dark age, the survivors would offer prayers for the return of weeds and bugs.
Laugh or cry.
Either way, Torah teaches that our existence depends on the existence of creatures who came before us.
In this case, it is best to follow Torah and Talmud, and give honor where honor is due.
— Laura Duhan Kaplan, 2011
Photo by Susanta Das, www.trekearth.com
Quotation from E.O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (W.W. Norton, 2006)
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