"The Jewish attitude is that life in all its aspects, in its totality, must somehow or other be bound up with holiness"

“Seen as separate and unrelated command­ments, each as an individual obligation and burden, the mitzvot seem to be a vast and even an absurd assortment of petty details which are, if not downright intimidating, then at least troublesome.

What we call details, however, are only parts of greater units which in turn combine in various ways into a single entity.

It is as though in exam ining the leaves and flowers of a tree, one were to be overwhelmed by the abundance, the variety, and the complexity of detail.

But when one realizes that it is all part of the same single growth, all part of the same branching out into manifold forms of the one tree, then the details would cease to be dis turbing and would be accepted as intrinsic to the wondrousness of the whole.

A basic idea underlying Jewish life is that there are no special frameworks for holiness.