Let My People Know

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: “Life is not composed of separate compartments.”

The Torah is structured like life itself.

Life, too, is not composed of separate compartments, each with its own character and nature.

Torah is like man, who is not composed of separate areas dealing only with certain relations and aspects.

Man and his life are always a mixture of everything together, of the whole world in all its elements.

To meet certain needs, man constructs partitions with which he demarcates separate areas within himself, but this demarcation is technical and artificial.

In truth, there is no part of himself that is not nourished and that does not draw sustenance, to a greater or lesser extent, from all the other parts of his being.

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz