What Elijah Taught about Women, Wasps, and Why God Keeps Pests Alive

The prophet who ascended in a chariot of fire did not spend eternity in silent contemplation. Elijah came back. He came back repeatedly, and the questions he brought answers to were not the grand ones. He came back to talk about women. And about wasps.

These two revelations, preserved together in Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's comprehensive synthesis of rabbinic tradition compiled between 1909 and 1938, are easy to miss as a pair. Put side by side, they form an argument about the nature of creation and the logic of preservation that runs deeper than either story alone.

The Deep Meaning Behind the Helpmeet

Elijah came to Rabbi Jose and explained something the rabbi had not understood. The Torah's description of woman as ezer kenegdo, a helpmeet for man (Genesis 2:18), carries a meaning that the surface of the text does not reveal. Elijah moved through the explanation carefully, using example after example to show how essential women are to men, not in a subordinate sense but in an interdependent one. The argument was about mutual necessity, about how the architecture of creation is built around relationship rather than hierarchy.

This kind of explanation was characteristic of Elijah's teachings. He appeared to rabbis at the boundary of what they could figure out alone, and he carried the rest of the distance. The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the seventh-century Aramaic translation and expansion of the Torah, repeatedly describes the relationship between man and woman in terms of this mutual completion, the idea that neither is fully themselves without the other. Elijah's teaching to Rabbi Jose was not sentimental. It was structural. Creation itself was built this way.

Why God Does Not Destroy the Useless Things

Rabbi Nehorai had been wrestling with a harder question. Creation is full of creatures that seem to serve no purpose, animals that harm, insects that afflict, parasites that offer nothing. If God is good and creation is intentional, what are these things doing here? Why were they made? Why are they preserved?

The answer that came to Rabbi Nehorai was startling in its logic. God looks at the superfluous creatures, the harmful ones, the ones that appear to be mistakes, and the sight of them prevents something. It prevents the destruction of the world. When God contemplates the wickedness and iniquity of human beings, the thought arises: why preserve a creation that has gone so wrong? And then God looks at the creatures that are, by any useful measure, pointless or worse. If God preserves those, how much more must God preserve human beings, whose potential for good is immense?

The useless wasp is, in this reading, an argument for human survival.

What This Logic Asks of Creation

The Zohar, first published around 1280 CE in Castile, Spain, in the school of Rabbi Moses de Leon, is preoccupied with the question of why imperfection exists within a creation made by a perfect God. One of its recurring answers is that the lower things serve the higher, not by their virtue but by their existence, that even the broken and the harmful have a role in the structure of divine compassion. The tradition surrounding Elijah's ascent describes him as uniquely positioned to understand these structural questions because he stands between the earthly and heavenly realms, neither fully one nor the other.

The teaching about noxious insects is not comforting in the usual sense. It does not say that every painful thing has a good purpose we cannot see. It says something stranger: that the preservation of the useless is itself an act of divine mercy, and that mercy, once established as a principle, cannot then be withheld from us. God cannot selectively apply a standard of preservation. What God maintains for the wasp, God must maintain for the human being.

Two Questions, One Argument

The teaching about women and the teaching about wasps come from the same place. Both are about what it means that God designed creation as a web of interdependence and mutual need, not a hierarchy of the useful over the useless. Women are not accessories to men; they are constitutive of what men can become. Wasps are not errors; they are reminders to God of the logic of preservation.

Midrash Rabbah, the fifth-century Palestinian collection, returns to this theme in its commentary on Genesis, asking again and again why a God of perfect wisdom would create anything imperfect and answering that imperfection is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. A creation that contained only the good and the useful would have no argument for mercy. The creatures that seem most unnecessary are, by that logic, the ones that most guarantee our continued existence.

Elijah carried these teachings across centuries because they answer a question that does not go away: why should we exist at all, given everything we do? The answer, buried in a meditation on wasps, is quietly audacious. God has already decided not to destroy the pointless things. You are not among them. You have more argument for your existence than any of them. And that argument, the prophets hold, is enough.