How Are You Here?

By: Rabbi Yossi Rosenberg (Excerpt from Yated Ne’eman, printed with their kind permission) It’s statistically impossible for you to be here. There are over 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) neurons in an average human brain, and over 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) synapses, connections through which the neurons communicate with each other. In one eye alone, the part that sees is comprised of tiny rods and cones. Each human retina can have about 7,000,000 (seven million) cones and between 75,000,000 (seventy-five million) and 150,000,000 (one hundred and fifty million) rods! The human circulatory system has blood vessels that reach every cell in our bodies, including over 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) microscopic capillaries. If we were to stretch our blood vessels out in one straight line, it would go around the world over two and a half times! Yet, our heart, pumping at an average of seventy to eighty beats per minute, circulates all of our blood through our entire system of blood vessels around three times every minute! The pumping is powered by electricity manufactured in the heart itself. The average adult human produces 200,000,000,000 (two hundred billion) red blood vessels, 10,000,000,000 (ten billion) white blood cells, and 400,000,000,000 (four hundred billion) platelets per day. These transport oxygen and whatever is necessary for every cell in the body – such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, salts, glucose, calcium, iron, copper, etc. – all in a perfectly organized and highly regulated manner. They also carry away carbon dioxide and other waste products, and fight off thousands of potential diseases through a sophisticated system of ever-changing, custom-made antibodies. Every single person since creation has his or her own unique genome sequence made up of approximately 3,000,000,000 (three billion) pairs of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), structured in a stunning double-helix polymer containing four nitrogenous bases attached to a deoxyribonucleic sugar molecule and a phosphate molecule. These are just a tiny sampling of the trillions of highly sophisticated and exquisitely controlled activities going on each and every second in every human body. Clearly, then, you are not – statistically speaking – here right now, simply because there is no way that you are alive and capable of reading. It’s impossible. There’s just no way for so many trillions of moving parts operated by so many different yet interconnected systems to work properly for one day, let alone for years and years. The problem is the fact that you are here! Clearly, it would be safe to say that our very existence is living proof that Hashem is in charge of that which He created, and that He takes care of it all, down to the minutest details, regardless of what may or may not be the actual statistical outcome.