I recently heard Steven Spielberg speaking on the news about extraterrestrials. Reflecting on this, my chavruta and I got into a conversation about the Jewish question of aliens. Is it possible? What would it mean for Torah if there were other life forms on other planets? Much has been written on the subject from a halachic and Jewish theological perspective, going back hundreds of years. But for me, the question brings up the vastness of time and space we live in.

If biologists are correct that we are the product of billions of years of evolution, then each of us sits atop an enormous number of generations and the energy and spawnings that produced us. How many people were never born? How many died before they could mature? And yet here we are—alive, present, conscious. What a startling gift. What a profound reality. What would it mean to live with this awareness every day? What sense of obligation, responsibility, and gratitude would we carry? The idea is mind-boggling once we actually pay attention to it.

We live not only in this almost infinite flow of time, but in space as well. Each of us, as an individual, stands at the center of everything we experience and know, yet we live in a universe so vast and perplexing it’s hard to believe it’s real—a universe that we’re told, by both Kabbalah and science, emerged from one infinitely dense, infinitely small point and expanded into something billions of light-years across, holding trillions of stars. A light-year, as you know, is the distance light travels in a year—trillions of miles. The universe spans that distance, multiplied by billions. The closest star to us besides the sun is so far away that one of our rockets, traveling at 38,000 miles an hour, would take 77,000 years to reach it. And how many stars are there altogether? They say our galaxy alone holds 400 billion, and the observable universe holds something like 600 sextillion, which is a 6 followed by 23 zeros.

It’s all hard to fathom, but if our lives are real, then this is the world we live in. As Jews, in the face of all that vastness, we believe that we matter, that we carry a moral mission. It’s a good thing we have a Torah that gives us a sense of meaning, or I believe the sheer scale of our reality would drive us to madness.

The most perplexing idea at the center of religious thought is connected to all this: that God is, paradoxically, both omnipotent and caring, infinite and personal. When we face the mind-boggling nature of our lives and our universe, we can take comfort in a tradition going back thousands of years that insists there is an intelligent creator, that there is rhyme and reason, and that human beings matter.

But this must also make us humble. Just as God holds together infinitude and intimacy, so must we hold together our own contradictions. It was said of Reb Simcha Bunem, an early 19th-century Hasidic rebbe, that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one was inscribed a saying from the Mishnah, “Bishvili nivra ha-olam”—“for my sake the world was created.” On the other was a phrase spoken by our father Avraham in the Torah, “V’anokhi afar v’efer”—“I am but dust and ashes.”

In this week’s Torah portion, Korach argues that Moshe and Aaron shouldn’t be set apart as leaders, since all the people are holy and God dwells among them. He was punished for this, but in a sense, he was right; all the people are holy. So why was Korach punished? I think it came down to motivation. He grasped that he mattered infinitely, that everyone does, but that insight has to be balanced by humility. Though we stand at the center of our own experience, though we are made in the image of God, though we seem to matter a great deal and sit atop billions of years of generations, we remain fleeting, fragile, and dependent. The vastness of time and space should leave us with a profound sense of obligation, for we have been chosen to be here. But we must also look behind us in time and out into that vastness, and understand that we are small.