The Bee Man

One of my favorite places in the whole of Jerusalem is an outdoor market called Mahane Yehuda (literally: ‘the camp of Judah’). Spend just five minutes hanging out in Mahane Yehuda, and every type of Jew, every type of Israeli, will walk past you. Mahane Yehuda is one stop shopping for great bread; delicious fruit and veg; cheap falafel; fresh herbs and spices; cheap clothes – in short, pretty much everything that a person can ask for.
 
But as well as being a marketplace for produce, it’s also a marketplace for life-lessons. If you have your eyes open, and a bit of patience, you can learn a lot about life at Mahane Yehuda.
 
Last week, my husband and I drove down there to do a bit of last minute shopping for Shabbat. Once we’d got everything we were after, we bought a boureka and escaped across the road from the market to Nachlaot, where we found a quiet green spot with a bench, to sit and eat it.
 
I’d just taken the first bite, when a friendly, but oddly-dressed older man with a long white beard waved hello. I hesitated. I’ve been in Israel for almost six years, but the fear of being ‘noticed by a weirdo’ still pops up every now and then. In London, I would have been on the defensive immediately. But in Jerusalem, in broad daylight, with my husband by my side, I really wasn’t that bothered, more curious as to what was about to happen.
 
The man disappeared behind a tree, then reappeared with a small plastic bottle, filled with honey bees. He started talking to us in perfect American English, and asked us if he could teach us about the healing power of a bee sting.
 
I looked at him, and I could see two things immediately: 1) He was definitely bonkers. 2) He was definitely harmless – there was a quiet grace about him, and I could see that strange as the conversation might be, it wouldn’t be dangerous to talk with him.
 
The man went on to tell us that he’d just stung himself on the forehead four times with a bee – now that he mentioned it, I could see the stingers sticking out of his skin like big splinters – and that he was stinging himself a lot this year, as he was hoping to keep a lot of the illnesses that affect older people at bay.
 
He talked a lot about serotonin, which is apparently what bees ‘inject’ into people when they sting them. He explained that it hurts like heck, but only for 15 minutes – “But the health benefits last a lifetime! A bee sting can cure chronic pain instantly! There are so many people who used to have arthritis, who got stung by a bee, and it all cleared up and never came back.”
 
He spoke in such an articulate way, quoting sources in medical journals and reviews that my husband and I quickly realized this was no ordinary bonkers bee man. From the way he spoke, we could tell that he’d only approached us because he needed a bit of cash.
 
Thank G-d, we had a bit of change to give him, and that’s when he started to tell us even more profound things. The bee man had had a hard life. He was educated to PhD level, in some sort of medical science, but after his wife up and left with the kids one day, without telling him where she’d gone, his life fell apart.
 
“I read Psalm 30 a lot in those days, and it really brought me a lot of comfort,” he explained. He’d got into the bee stinging after a very serious car accident had left him desperately looking for a solution to his terrible pain.
 
He explained that G-d was looking after him, and that G-d provided him with his every need.
 
“Where are you living?” I asked him.
 
“Under a tree. But I love it. I hear G-d’s spirit in the leaves, when the wind blows, and I’m living a life where I’m seeing G-d’s grandeur everywhere I look.”
 
Usually, he made do with very little indeed, but for some undefined reason, he needed a few shekels today, which is why he’d approached us.
 
After he’d gone, my husband and I agreed that we’d met a lot of ‘sane’ people who were far crazier than the bee man. The bee man had clearly had a hard life; he’d clearly been through a lot, and in some ways, it had clearly pushed him over the line of what most of us consider ‘normal’.
 
But he had such a peaceful face, such quiet serenity, for someone who really had nothing except the clothes he stood up in and three small plastic bags. In the car on the way to Jerusalem, we’d been listening to a shiur by Rav Arush where he was explaining that the secret to making a living without stress and hardship was actually very simple, namely, to understand that it’s G-d’s job to provide for us.
 
For as long as He wants us alive, Hashem will feed, clothe and take care of us, even if it means we live a very poor, simple life.
 
I heard that CD, and I wondered: can people still live like that, these days, when everything is complicated by all the ‘must haves’ that we all feel we need just to wake up in the morning?
 
But then, G-d sent me the bee man, who really owned nothing, and who really did trust that Hashem would take care of him every single day. I thought about him, I thought about all the millions of people who run themselves ragged trying to ‘make a living’, and again, I wondered to myself: who, really, is crazy?