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Leave it up to the rabbis of the Talmud to devote tractates to everything—even to idol worship, which they detested. During the course of this tractate they speculate about how God spends a typical day. In addition to Torah study and teaching (amazing how God chooses rabbis as a model for behavior), they determine that God, with considerable effort, “sustains the entire world, from the horns of wild oxen to the eggs of lice.” (Avodah Zarah 3b.8, Koren translation)
Turn over the oddities of this statement, and you can find an awe-inspiring ecological message.
The examples chosen to explain God’s concern for the world are a rhetorical device expressing a comprehensive “from A to Z.” The horns of wild oxen are the most powerful and fearsome weapons in the animal kingdom, whereas the eggs of lice are trivial and seemingly of no importance—and even worse, a scourge.
The rabbis are taking a holistic view of nature that matches twenty-first-century sensibilities quite well. No creature is unneeded. Every bacterium or spore contributes to the balance of life.
Lice must have been persistent pests in the rabbis’ time, as in our own, but the rabbis give God the benefit of the doubt and assume the lice have some role to play.
In a time when we prepare for the High Holidays, as we consider our transgressions and moral failings, it is encouraging to remember that God has room for the incipient violence of the wild oxen’s horns and the infective invasiveness of the lice’s eggs. All the more can God accept us, with all our negative traits.
And if even lice deserve God’s solicitous nurturing, perhaps this grace extends also to idol-worshippers?
Andy Oram
June 20, 2025
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.