Rabbi Roodyn

After having discussed the increasing levels of complexity we encounter as we move up nature’s food chain, the Malbim then brings us to the pinnacle of creation, man.

The complexity of the human body is mind boggling. The estimate of cells in the human body ranges from 100-200 trillion. So if every cell did at least one chemical reaction per second, than the number of reactions must truly be higher than 400 billion. Cells perform thousands, if not millions of chemical reactions in every cell every second. The complexity and the total number is too huge to predict or even imagine.

If we have 100-200 trillion cells in our bodies, than we have a thousand more times cells in our bodies as the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. If we take one step forward and ask how many atoms do we have in our bodies, that number is also about a thousand more galaxies that we know to exist in the universe.

There is a famous pasuk in the book of Job (19:26) that says ומבשרי אחזה אלוק, from my flesh I will see G-d. When we look at ourselves through the microscope rather than the telescope we can really start to understand the true meaning of this chapter of Tehillim.