Lessons I learned from an ‘Ant’
I recently experienced an ethical dilemma.
A barely visible ant was slowly making its way across my living room floor. My first instinct was to step on the tiny bug. But I hesitated. In that moment, I became acutely aware that I was about to kill a living creature that was doing me no harm.
So, I let it go.
The next day, the same thing happened. I had no idea whether it was the same ant. In the past, I would have unceremoniously disposed of the pest. But once again, I found myself hesitating as I watched it slowly disappear under the floorboards. I wondered why I had hesitated—and why I suddenly cared.
From a scientific perspective, ants are remarkably sophisticated creatures. They can learn, navigate, communicate chemically, cooperate within enormous colonies, and solve surprisingly complex problems. But their nervous systems are fundamentally different from ours, and we cannot assume that they experience emotions such as love, anger, fear, or pain in the same way humans do.
Jewish thought approaches the question from a different frame of reference—not from a physical perspective, but from a spiritual one.
Judaism teaches that nothing God created is without purpose. Even something as seemingly insignificant as an ant has a place in creation. The Talmud teaches that God created nothing in vain. What appears insignificant to us may have a purpose within a Divine order far greater than we can comprehend.
That realization changes the way we look at the smallest creatures.
The Torah does not command us to treat every living thing as though it were human. Jewish law permits us to eliminate pests that cause damage, threaten health, or create serious distress. But Judaism also teaches us not to inflict suffering or destruction unnecessarily.
This is the principle of Tza’ar Ba’alei Chaim—the prohibition against causing unnecessary suffering to living creatures.
The Torah’s commandment of Shiluach HaKen, sending away the mother bird before taking her eggs or young, is a powerful example. A revered Jewish sage, The Ramban, understood the commandment as helping cultivate compassion within us. The point is not merely what happens to the bird. The Torah is shaping the human being.
The same principle appears in the prohibition against plowing the fields with an ox and a donkey yoked together. The Sefer HaChinuch explains that the animals differ in strength and temperament and forcing them to work together can cause unnecessary distress.
These commandments teach something larger than their immediate circumstances: We are not supposed to become indifferent to suffering simply because we possess the power to cause it.
That is what happened to me with the ant.
I possessed an overwhelming advantage. I could have ended its life with no effort and no consequence to myself. But the fact that I could did not mean that I should.
Jewish tradition has long valued this kind of sensitivity. The Arizal, the great 16th-century Kabbalist, was famously careful about killing even tiny creatures when there was no need to do so. The underlying idea is that unnecessary cruelty does not merely affect the object of our cruelty. It affects us. Repeated acts of needless destruction can dull our sensitivity; restraint can refine it.
An ant crawling across my living room floor hardly seems like a mystical event. Yet the significance lies precisely in that.
A Chabad sage, the Baal Shem Tov, taught about Divine Providence—that nothing occurs outside God’s awareness and providence. In that sense, the question is not why an ant happened to cross my path. The more important question is why I was given the opportunity to notice it.
If the ant is harming me, I may remove it. But if it is harmless, I can choose to let it live—and in doing so, allow its existence to awaken something in me: compassion, humility, gratitude, and awareness of the Creator.
There is also a remarkable Jewish story about another tiny creature.
According to tradition, when the soon-to-be King David was fleeing from King Saul, he hid in a cave. Saul’s soldiers came searching for him. At the entrance to the cave, they saw a spiderweb stretching across the opening, spun shortly after David entered. Because no one could have entered without disturbing the web, they moved on.
The spider, insignificant as it seemed, had become an instrument of Divine providence. The spider saved David.
The lesson is unmistakable: We should be careful about declaring anything in God’s creation useless.
Twice, I had the opportunity to kill something tiny and harmless simply because I could.
Twice, I stopped.
Yes, it was only a tiny ant making its way across my living room floor. But somewhere between seeing it and letting it go, I realized: there is a purpose for everything that exists, even when we cannot comprehend what its purpose is.