I hate mosquitoes, having endured my share of sleepless nights itching from their bites and being startled by the maddening drone of their speeding wings. I reserve my greatest antipathy for those giant mosquitoes that sport long, ugly legs and tubular bodies. I am not fooled by the seeming frailty of their translucent wings, which move three hundred to six hundred times per second. They lift and land their owners with the impunity of a rogue pilot, treating every surface of the world like an open runway and the surface of skin like the unlocked door of an unguarded blood bank.
I sometimes chastise myself, howbeit mildly, for such uncharitable views of the mosquito whenever I encounter one minding its own business. I argue with myself in behalf of its survival and good fortune. With a nerve ganglion the size of a period, instead of a brain, the mosquito cannot be held accountable for much of anything. Therefore, have pity upon the poor insect, whose five months on this earth will be spent mired in the menial, instinctive repetition of breeding and blood sucking, before it becomes the victim of old age or predation. And consider that, for all of its seeming lack of purpose, the mosquito is God’s amazing version of a hang glider that fits properly into nature’s evolutionary economy. I like to remind myself of an ancient Jewish legend I once learned about an evil king into whose nose a mosquito flew, where it bored a hole in his brain, nested, and killed the tyrant after growing to over two pounds. Much to my shame, I usually conclude my meditations upon the mosquito’s life by ushering it into the grave with my hand or the advertisements section of the newspaper.
Last week, I prepared for morning worship, looking out from a covered boat house over Lake George. The rain clouds danced just above the water, as the fiery multicolored carpet of autumn leaves stretched out all around them. Just before I recited the first words in my prayer book, I glanced at the wooden post which extended vertically from the floor to the roof. In its corner, a giant mosquito trapped in a web struggled mightily to free itself, its wings consuming the last bits of its energy in a desperate bid to cheat death and his agent, the spider. I thought of Virginia Woolf’s great essay, The Death Of The Moth, in which she meditates upon the power of life and death while watching a day moth struggle and breathe its last in the corner of her windowpane. She writes that “One’s sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life.”
I am not a patron saint of animals and insects. I would never treat them cruelly, but I did recently give up vegetarianism in favor of the hearty flavor of chicken. Yet at that moment by the lake, my sympathies, however grudging, were moving towards saving the mosquito’s life. Standing in prayer while knowing it was dying, struck me more as callousness, than as praise to our common Creator. “What are you thinking?” I suddenly interrogated myself. “This is how nature works. Why not worry about the spider and her babies who also have to survive? Besides, you hate mosquitoes. Leave that web alone.”
Yes, I hate mosquitoes. Yes, the spider would have to build another web and wait for another catch as juicy as its giant victim. However, the spider would have another chance to do this. Once that last bit of life left it, the mosquito would return to the earth, with no more opportunities to channel the creative forces of nature as only a mosquito can and as only that mosquito could.
Gently interfering with nature’s normal course of life and death, as humans often do, I brushed aside the web and set the mosquito free.
Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY.
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