In the days after Artemis II returned safely to Earth, I found myself going down a rabbit hole.

I started reading obsessively about space, watching clips, thinking more seriously about the scale of it all, the distance, the time, the sheer size of the universe.

Our Milky Way galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. Beyond it are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with stars of their own. These numbers are so large they stop functioning as numbers. They become more like a feeling, specifically, the feeling of being very, very small.

And it’s not just about size. It’s about time.

When you look up at a clear night sky, you’re not seeing the present. You’re seeing the past. Those stars are so unimaginably far away that the light reaching your eyes tonight left its source millions or billions of years ago. It has been traveling through space longer than humans have existed. The night sky is a time machine, and standing under it long enough will shrink you.

We are one species, on one planet, orbiting one star, in one galaxy among billions.

What are we, really, in the grand scheme of things? And how do we find meaning inside a scale that makes us essentially invisible?

There’s a Hasidic teaching attributed to Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, an early 19th-century Polish rabbi known for his psychological sharpness, that cuts right to the heart of this.

He said every person should carry two notes, one in each pocket.

On one it should read: “For my sake, the world was created.” On the other: “I am but dust and ashes.”

The point isn’t to pick one. It’s to hold both simultaneously, because depending on where you’re standing, both are completely true.

This is not a new tension. Jewish tradition was wrestling with it long before space travel existed.

In Tehillim 8:4-5, King David looks up at the night sky and asks: “When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you established, what is man that you are mindful of him?”

King David, perhaps the most consequential figure in Jewish history, a man who had conquered kingdoms, written scripture, and shaped a civilization still looked up at the stars and felt small.

And yet the same tradition that produced that question also insists that human life is not an accident, that what we do here actually matters.

What’s striking is that Jewish thinkers didn’t try to dissolve this tension. They leaned into it and each one did so in a way that feels surprisingly relevant today.

Rav Kook wrote that the more a person contemplates the fullness of existence, the more their soul expands. He wasn’t offering comfort exactly. He was making a demand: that we let the vastness of the universe enlarge us rather than defeat us. Smallness, for Rav Kook, was a failure of imagination, not a fact of nature.

And when humans first reached space, the Lubavitcher Rebbe didn’t retreat into defensiveness. He saw it as confirmation of something Judaism had always taught: that exploring and understanding creation is itself a sacred act.

That paradox doesn’t just apply to us as individuals. It applies to peoples and nations too, those who have survived against the odds, held onto their identity, and refused to be erased. But perhaps nowhere is it more striking than with the Jewish people.

We are fifteen million Jews in a world of eight billion. A statistical rounding error.

The State of Israel is a tiny country, surrounded by nations many times its size and population.

And yet it commands a level of global attention that has no parallel. Debated in parliaments. Dominating headlines. Driving protests across continents. The attention itself tells a story. At the center of a resurgence of antisemitism that crosses political lines in a way that illustrates what political theorists call the horseshoe effect, the idea that the far right and the far left, rather than being opposites, bend toward each other at the extremes. Nowhere is that more visible right now than in their shared hostility toward Jews and Israel.

A people this small should not generate this much heat. And yet, here we are.

Zionism, understood through this lens, is not simply a political movement. It is a refusal to equate smallness with irrelevance.

It is a decision, made deliberately, against history, to participate actively in the world rather than simply survive it. To stop being a people that things happen to, and become a people that helps shape what happens.

Consider what that has actually looked like in practice. Ingathering Jews from over 100 countries after thousands of years of exile and forging them into a single society. Reviving Hebrew, a language that hadn’t been spoken as a mother tongue in nearly two thousand years, and turning it into the daily language of a modern nation. Reclaiming and rebuilding a civilization, not as a museum piece frozen in the past, but as something living, evolving, and radically alive.

It doesn’t eliminate scrutiny. It doesn’t simplify anything. And it was never a license for arrogance. If anything, the tradition demands the opposite. Significance without humility isn’t the Jewish idea. Carrying both notes means that how you show up matters just as much as showing up at all.

The universe is vast beyond anything we can fully process.

We are, in every measurable sense, small.

But we are also the ones who looked at that vast, indifferent universe and decided to matter anyway, writing psalms, returning to the land, rebuilding a civilization, and insisting on a future.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim didn’t say to choose a pocket. He said to carry both notes at once.

Small in number. Small on the map. Enormous in the questions we carry and the story we refuse to stop writing.

That’s not an accident. That’s a story worth telling.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)