From Toward a Meaningful Life:The Wisdom of the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Adapted by Simon Jacobson (New York: William Morrow and Company Inc., 1995)

…In order to fully understand ourselves and live a meaningful life, we must return to the very beginning and look at the significance of birth. What your birth means is that you are God’s child. Your birth is not by accident; God chooses each of us to fulfill a specific mission in this world, just as a composer arranges each musical note. Take away even one note, and the entire composition is affected. Each person matters; each person is irreplaceable. Your life is always leading you toward a destiny, and every single moment is meaningful and precious…. God feels great joy when you are born, the greatest pleasure imaginable, for the moment of birth realizes His intention in wanting you, which encompasses the potential for all your future achievements.

There is no greater blessing than the capacity to give birth, for it is the one opportunity we have to truly create, and to create something from our own flesh and blood. We spend our lives merely reshaping things. We invest money to make more money. We take words that already exist, we order them, and produce a piece of writing… But birth is not just reshaping one form of matter into another. It is an utterly mysterious act, the physical creation of something out of nothing. No matter how technologically advanced we become, the smartest men and women among us will never be able to replicate the mystery of birth. And because a new child will one day have the power to have children of his or her own, birth also gives us access to the infinite, to eternity.