Constant Creation

 

I'm reading this nice book, Adon Haniflaos - A Lesson a Day, which is about "opening our eyes to see the amazing wonders of Hashem's creation."

 

Day 105 is about the eyes and how the retina contains millions of special sensors called rods and cones.  Within the rods and cones there is a chemical that is sensitive to light called "purple visual," which responds to light by separating and converting light into electrical signals that are sent to the optic nerve in the brain.  The brain interprets the signals into an image of what was recorded by the eyes.

 

After sending the signal, the purple visual recombines and allows the cycle to begin again, thus giving us near continuous vision.  The whole process takes only a fraction of a second and it seems to us that we have continuous vision, that we are seeing motion without interruption.  Actually, we see a series of still images that give the impression of motion.

 

That's all from the book.  It struck me that this description of how the eyes work sounds like המחדש בטובו בכל יום תמיד מעשה בראשית  - Hashem's constant renewal of Creation.  Hashem created the world yesh m'ayin - something out of nothing.  When we take already existing material and shape it into something, a table out of wood, a cup out of silver, once the item is made it's finished.  There is no need to do anything further.  But something created out of nothing cannot continue to exist without continuous input from the Creator.  So although the world seems to us to exist continuously, in reality, Hashem is constantly recreating it.

 

This is a big and deep subject.  There is plenty of material in sefarim and in English too about this.  I thought it was nifty that we have something within our very own bodies, the eyes, that provide an example of this.