A min — a sectarian — once argued with Rabbi Ami against the resurrection of the dead. "How can God bring back bodies that have returned to dust?" he demanded. "The dust scatters; the elements disperse; there is nothing left to resurrect."
Rabbi Ami answered with a parable, as the sages often did.
A king, he said, once ordered his servants to build him a palace in a place where there was no water and no clay. Somehow they managed it. They built the palace out of whatever materials they could drag in from elsewhere, and when it was finished it stood. But after a time it collapsed.
Then the king commanded them to rebuild the same palace, this time in a place where both water and clay were already at hand. And the servants answered, "We cannot."
The king rebuked them. "If you could build a palace where there was neither water nor clay, why can you not rebuild it now, where both lie ready?"
Rabbi Ami drew the parallel. The Holy One created the human body from nothing at all, at the beginning of the world. Every body that will be resurrected already existed once, already walked, already left its elements scattered somewhere in the earth. If God made a person from pure absence, how much more easily will He remake them from presence?
Then Rabbi Ami pointed out to the skeptic the ordinary miracles around them. The field-mouse, which some ancient naturalists believed began each day half-earth and half-flesh and became wholly flesh by the next. The snails that erupt on the bare stones after the first rain. Life bursting out of the seemingly inanimate.
"How much easier," he concluded, "to bring back what once already lived." The resurrection, in other words, is not even God's hardest act. Creation was.