“One of the cardinal principles of Judaism is that the mitzvot are all of a piece, parts of a single whole that is in its essence complete, the details being knit together into a unified fabric.
Yet the inner connectedness of the mitzvot has another significance.
Just as the failure to perform a single mitzvah diminishes the whole, each mitzvah in a sense includes the whole.
In the prayer “For the Unification,” recited before the performance of many mitzvot, one prays “to fulfill the mitzvah in..all its particulars, and the 613 mitzvot that depend upon it.”
All 613 are in a sense compressed into each individual mitzvah.”
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From “All or Nothing: The False Dilemma” in Teshuvah by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
