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oceans, and mountains swirl and rise and sink. This rabbinic midrash reflects the same reality that science does: we are all, literally, composed of the entire earth, indeed, of stardust from supernovae millions of light-years away. The components of our bones, the cells of our blood, the air that we breathe—all that was used by others before us,

Someone I loved once told me that there are fragments within us that are the same age as the universe, and because we are matter, we can never be destroyed. That a part of us will live forever and ever, and that in making us the universe was celebrating itself, we are its living, breathing joy.

As physicist Paul Davies writes in The Goldilocks Enigma (Allen Lane, 2006): Somehow the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but also its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make not just life, but understanding. The evolving cosmos has spawned beings who are able not merely to watch the show, but to

There are no new ingredients in the universe, and humans – however they may look – are made of roughly the same things we are.