One Good Deed…

It looked like a bumblebee but something was odd. It seemed too shiny and too black, too large-limbed and lumbering. Maybe, I thought, it was just an aged member of the species.

I watched as it crawled slowly across a wooden beam that I had mounted last summer above the metal railing of the deck outside our dining room. Since our home’s main floor is its second one, there was a halachic need – as per the Biblical law of “ma’akeh,” or “roof enclosure” (Deuteronomy 22:8) – to extend the deck’s waist-high railing upward. Hence the home-made wooden extension the bee had discovered.

I have always enjoyed the company of bees. As a child I would watch them, capture them, observe their behavior and occasionally endure their stings. Even to this day, in the sukkah, as others recoil at the sight of yellow-jackets, I will happily hold out my hand for the insects to crawl on, and escort them outside. Bumblebees, though, with their amazing flight maneuvers, have always been a personal favorite. And this one was strange.

What he did was even stranger, crawling to the underside of the wood and just parking himself there, upside down. Investigating, I saw that he had found, and apparently found to his liking, a perfectly round hole, about a half-inch in diameter. Compounding the strangeness, I didn’t remember ever noticing the hole.

That was on the second day of Shavuot, just as I completed a session of Torah-study. (The deck is my special study-retreat, weather permitting.) Later in the day, I noticed that the bee had tunneled into the hole; puffs of sawdust could be seen emerging from it; eventually all that was visible of the animal was its hindquarters. After the holiday, I did some research and discovered that the bee was a she, and not bumblebee at all, but a carpenter bee.

The female of the species, I learned, prepares a nursery for her offspring by excavating the underside – always the underside – of a piece of wood, creating a near-perfectly round hole and then burrowing an inch or so into it before abruptly turning at a right angle to continue her tunnel horizontally. Eventually the hollowed-out area will be where the bee lays her brood.

She will partition off different areas of the tunnel, providing each “room” with a wad of pollen and nectar, and then lay one egg on it before sealing it off. Each egg will become a larva that will subsist on its personal manna until it develops into a pupa and then, finally, a new bee. The young bees will then break through the partitions and escape into the outside world.

I can’t wait.

Maimonides characterizes the “path” to fulfilling the commandment of ahavat Hashem, loving G-d, thus: “When a person ponders [G-d’s] great and wondrous acts and creations and perceives in them His limitless wisdom… he loves and praises and extols [G-d] and is filled with a deep and great desire to know [Him]…” (Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah, 2:2)

The awe-inspiring is all around us, if we care to look and think, and are not fooled into imagining that nature’s fantasticalness is a phantasm, the meaningless yield of random meetings of molecules. Watching the carpenter bee was, for me, a new step on the path Maimonides describes.

And it reminded me, too, of a Talmudic aphorism: “The consequence of a mitzvah,” or commandment, “is another mitzvah.” (Avot, 4:2)

For had it not been for the mitzvah of ma’akeh, which had required me to build a sufficiently high railing for my deck, I would not have been able to study Torah, another mitzvah, of course, on my deck. The ma’akeh had led to Torah-study.

And had I not been studying Torah on my deck, I might never have met the carpenter bee, who I truly feel advanced me on the path leading to a most important mitzvah, ahavat Hashem.

© 2009 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

All Am Echad Resources essays are offered without charge for personal use and sharing, and for publication with permission, provided the above copyright notice is appended.