Â鶹ԼÅÄ

From Julia Neuberger Senior Rabbi at the west London Synagogue:

Whilst everyone is celebrating the magnificent England win on Sunday, spare a thought for the players, and indeed the fans, in Volgograd. Swarms of mosquitoes and midges have been bothering them. And, whilst the players were instructed by the FA to apply high strength insect repellent liberally before the game, you could still see them swatting bugs away from their faces.

I’m one pf those people that acts as an insect repellent- for everyone else. I get bitten by mosquitoes on the Tube, in the garden, everywhere. They go for me before anyone I’m with. For me, and probably for the players and fans in Russia, they are simply a painful and itchy irritant. But they also spread deadly diseases, such as malaria and Zika virus. So all credit to the Bill Gates Foundation for donating $4 million a few days ago towards creating self-destructive mosquitoes in a desperate bid to eradicate malaria 'within a generation' 

Which has left me wondering why we have mosquitoes at all, and what good purpose they serve. ‘Arov’, gnats or mosquitoes, is one of the ten plagues sent by God to the Egyptians in the Hebrew Bible, to persuade Pharaoh to let the people go. Their bites drove the Egyptians crazy! Mosquitoes were well known in the ancient world, and appear in Greek and Roman stories too. Yet what are they for, unless there is some purpose in an irritant for humans, and other mammals, that we do not understand? Some ecologists give them a bit of credit- they isay they serve as food for birds in the tundra, and that they do pollinate orchids, but that’s hardly enough!

Some physicists look at the universe and see a divine purpose or at least a divine spark that set off Big Bang. I am a simpler soul. I just want to know what God’s purpose was in creating the mosquito. For they only cause harm. So why has it taken human beings, endowed by God with super intelligence, so many millennia to wipe them out? Whilst other species face the threat of extinction because of us human beings, mosquitoes thrive. This must be a divine test of human beings- able to control so much of our universe, but taking millennia to eradicate the simple, but deadly, mosquito. It really does not reflect well on us.