The Symphony of Creation

"How manifold are Your works, Hashem! In wisdom have You made them all; the earth is filled with Your creations." (Psalms 104) We find ourselves sitting in a blossoming garden, our gaze fixed on the surroundings, our senses captivated by the array of colors and intoxicating fragrances. Unbeknownst to us, a fierce battle is unfolding in our internal immune system.

Hour by hour, our body stands as a fortified structure under the heavy bombardment of a hundred kinds of weapons, from arrows and spears to missiles with nuclear warheads—these are the foreign bodies, antigens, that penetrate our body. A vast system of antibodies, produced in specialized cells in the spleen and lymph tissues, awakens to action at all times. The fighting antibody against the threatening foreign body is always structured to match precisely the antigen that stimulated it.

No brilliant military commander has yet managed to implement such a defensive tactic. This is a protective battle waged separately against each of the attacking weapons, producing its own defense weapon simultaneously with its special ammunition, and operates exclusive against it. Sometimes the type of ammunition is effective not only for disabling the attacker but even for neutralizing it so that it cannot redevelop the same kind of weapon that was damaged.

Within a person unfolds a struggle that determines their fate—healthy or ill, alive or dead—while they gaze at a flower, completely oblivious. Born to enjoy the landscapes and sights around us, we are equipped with a device composed of the lens, iris, retina, and pupil. The retina is made up of nine separate layers altogether as thin as a sheet of paper.

The inner layer consists of 30 million rods and another three million compartments, perfectly aligned both with each other and concerning the lens. The lens expands and contracts as needed. We have a pair of eyes to enable stereoscopic vision, a spatial image. The optic nerve transmits the picture to the brain's recognition center, where this tiny inverted image gets translated into its real shape and size with the aid of millions of nerve fibers that lead to the brain.

This includes the ability to see a colored image, created by a sensation carried from warmth to light. Meanwhile, while chatting with friends, the host offers snacks. The hand tosses them into the mouth, which opens and closes as needed. The tongue moves the snack from side to side and front to back. While the jaws move up and down, the teeth grind, the glands create saliva that mixes with the snack—to ease its transport and initiate its chemical digestion.

Simultaneously, the stomach secretes juices that digest any food (and here's a wonder: the stomach itself does not digest itself with its juices, although it is made of the same material it digests!). The liver produces bile and drains it into the intestines, the required amount for each type of food, and the intestines complete the digestion. From the intestines—through countless ducts—the processed food is carried to every part of the body, with each duct delivering exactly the amount needed by the organ it services. Who is the commander and technician operating this system?

Not I, for I'm focused on the view before me, merely snatching snacks along the way. Part of your ear comprises 4,000 intricate, constantly tuned arches—unique in size and shape. They seem tailored to capture and convey to the brain everything from the roar of thunder to the slightest rustle of pine trees, to the delicate combination of tones and harmonies from all instruments of an orchestra. Meanwhile, many animals detect sounds beyond the frequency our ears can catch, and with sensitivity far surpassing our hearing capabilities. Humanity, with its intellect, developed instruments capable of hearing a fly's movements from a very great distance.

Why did the ear’s arch cells evolve more in animals than in humans? Why did they evolve in humans only to the extent needed for survival and then stop developing as in animals? Is there a power behind this activity that foresaw that man, with his intellectual power, would develop devices to satisfy his spiritual enjoyment which nature did not provide, whereas animals, lacking inventive intelligence, received the needed sensitivity and acuity in nature?

About the activities of the brain, genes, DNA and RNA, the heart, circulatory system, and more, "novels" have been written in modern physics and biology. What about the rest of the plants and animals, the minuscule creatures? There’s a sea turtle living tranquilly in the sea grass of Brazil’s coastal waters. Every two years, these turtles and their mates swim at a turtle's pace, 12,250 km straight to Ascension Island, tiny isles difficult to spot on a map. The turtles identify the islands, lay their eggs there and only there, and return to Brazil. The seaweed and fruits plant—sinks to the ocean’s depths every evening. Every morning, the seaweed "knows" the exact time sunrise will occur, traveling for two hours in the darkness from the ocean depths to stand in mandatory formation on the sea surface at dawn (plus-minus only a minute or two!).

Yet, there are wonders on land too. The mosquito, despite its tiny size, comprises a heart, stomach, intestines, blood vessels, and nerves. It can pierce our skin (compared to its length, this equals drilling a hole through a wall 40 cm thick). It feeds on our blood, hence our desire to kill it. For its survival, it was gifted with the ability to fly at 4 km per hour and was created lightweight so we wouldn't feel it perched on us.

In its bite, it injects into our body a pain-deadening substance (like a dentist’s anesthesia), and only after it flies away does the anesthetic effect cease, and we feel the pain, lifting a hand to kill the mosquito, which has already flown away and watches from afar as we strike... ourselves. Within its body, dozens of sporozoites traverse like through a palace, gathering in its mouth and entering our body when bitten, delivering malaria to us. Their size and weight compared to the mosquito are like a 1.5 kg chicken to a 4-ton elephant.

Yet each sporozoite is the size of a dog compared to a mouse the bacterium sees. Five hundred bacteria fit on a pinhead to play soccer. Billions of bacteria reside in every patch of earth, air, and sea—though we only see them under a microscope.

This single-cell, minuscule bacterium is composed of distinct organs perfected, countless atoms working in wondrous harmony, with each knowing its place and role. Each bacterium is five times larger than a virus, and so forth. The bee explores fields, discovers a flower field, and reports back to its comrades through its dances. Dance motion speed indicates the field’s distance, and dance form is a compass toward the flight: bounces from bottom to top mean moving toward the sun, top to bottom means:

a direction opposite the sun's position in the sky. The bee’s radar knows the sun’s location even on overcast and cloudy days. Incidentally, bees are not drawn to the flowers visible to us but detect them through ultraviolet rays enhancing the flowers' beauty. The bat delightfully devours night moths; how do these moths, whose ears are deaf to the world’s sounds, evade this predator? Only one sound this moth hears, just the bat’s call. Other moths escape bird predators by unfolding wings depicting an open eye, startling the small bird predator, since it resembles the eye of a larger bird chasing the small bird.

Thus, the moth creates the "illusion" of a large bird, frightening away the small bird chasing the moth to devour it. There's a water spider crafting a balloon-shaped nest and sticking it to something underwater. It then ascends to the surface, skillfully ensnares a single air bubble in the hairs beneath its body, dives with it into the water, and releases it beneath the nest. It repeats this operation repeatedly until the nest fills with air.

Then it has its offspring and raises them in the floating nest, protected from attacks from the air. How did it acquire such a marvelous blend of engineering talent, weaving skills, and aerodynamics? The moth sends a silent secret signal detected solely by its male counterpart, from vast distances away, despite scientists' efforts to create artificial smells to disrupt this communication. In contrast, the cricket rubs its legs or wings together, shaking 600 tons of air, and its mate hears it from half a mile away. The silent female moth and noisy cricket emit and receive signals. Humans with their intellect developed miracle devices—telephone and radio—for immediate communication. Yet humanity is still limited. The moth that preceded us continues to evoke our envy, until the day comes when our brains can develop a personal radio.

From "the small world"—humanity—to a journey through the greater world The distance between us and the sun is 150 million kilometers. This is synchronized with Earth. Were the distance shorter, all our water would evaporate, and we'd become torches in a global bonfire. If the sun were slightly farther away, we would be icy blocks in a vast freezing chamber. Thousands of comets fly toward us every day at speeds up to 60 km per second, and only the layer of air surrounding Earth protects us from them. A thin ozone layer encircling our globe inhibits the sun’s short waves, filtering only a small part for our eyes and bodies to endure the ultra-violet rays.

Mercury permanently turns one side toward the sun. Thus one side is desolate from heat, and the other desolate from cold. This would happen to us if our globe rotated around its axis once every 240 hours. In one hot day, everything would burn, and in one cold night, everything would freeze. The current rotation every 24 hours is just right. The precisely slanted axis of 23 degrees of our globe brings the earth its seasons.

At a different angle, all water would accumulate at the poles as ice mountains, turning the area between the equator and poles into a vast desert. If air contained 50% oxygen (and not 21% as needed and presently existing), a single lightning bolt would explode and burn all the rainforest. We breathe this oxygen and transfer it, via the blood, to all body parts, to burn our food. From this combustion, carbon is formed in our cells, expelled through the lungs, and absorbed by plants dependent on carbon.

They separate it into carbon for building their bodies and produce sugar, fibers, flowers, fruits, and more from carbon and water. They also create oxygen and release it into the air, so we have it again to breathe, separate again, and supply carbon back to the plant, and so on. It's a totally perfect coordination. Even inanimate Earth works to sustain our lives. Underground, methane gas forms, helping transport hydrogen from Earth to the stratosphere in amounts needed for appropriate oxygen concentration in the lower atmosphere.

This gas producer is the beetle. Aluck, the famous researcher, wrote in "Newsweek": "Some biologists study land beetles. They noted a certain amount of methane gas is released from them. This didn’t hold much importance for them. Other scientists, exploring in the upper atmosphere, naturally noticed the methane gas, but they know nothing about the beetle." So, not all connections appear visible.

Say, how do you know all this? This was established by great scientists like Prof. Katzir in his book "In the Crucible of Scientific Revolution", Prof. D. Cohen and G. Gilat, and Dr. A. Heller in their articles in "Thoughts", K. Frisch in his research on the life of bees, and A.K. Morrison in his wonderful book "Man Does Not Stand Alone", where he gathered hundreds of facts from various natural sciences.

- Ah, now I get it. You played this entire symphony of humanity and the cosmos for me, just so I'd recognize the harmony of its sounds and be convinced that the world has a creator, so I'd understand that the order and wisdom in the world is a mathematical proof of Hashem's existence? - Certainly! Why does everyone understand, with simple and healthy logic, that a cat jumping on a piano will not produce a Chopin masterpiece, that an encyclopedia didn’t result from an explosion in a printing press, and that the collision of sausage, glass, and upholstery fabric didn’t create a car. Was this magnificent world really created by accident, just like that, by a cosmic accident in the highways of space? - Well, I’m already tired, let's go to the concert. They're playing Beethoven's "Eroica" today.

Just listen to it, and you'll witness this creator’s peak genius. - No, I don't want to. I've already heard "Eroica" once. In my ears, it's not a great, wonderful, and impressive piece. It’s merely a random collection of sounds! - What happened, we’ve traded roles?"... One who reflects and considers Hashem's wondrous deeds in living creatures excels over them, as deeply as his understanding of them. (Duties of the Heart, Second Gate).