Given the creation by God of a complete universe, it is a basic assumption that everything is interconnected.
One can see something like this by looking at drops of water.
One sees reflections, smaller ones and bigger ones, like a house of mirrors — the same thing, the same nature, reflected in different ways.
It follows that if I would know perfectly, completely, entirely, one part, then I would know the whole.
It is a beautiful thing.
When God says, “Let us make man,” He is calling to the whole universe: “Let us make man.”
And each contributes something: the foxes and the lions, the monkeys and the angels — all give something.
So we are the result of everything that is.
The idea is that we contain — and this point is essential — the mind – body point of connection.
The same hierarchy that exists in the body exists in the mind.
One of the ways to explain the basic concept of our religion is to say that because we are men, we have to connect.
We have free will, and we have the ability to repair.
Because we have free will, we are also the only ones who have the ability to distort.
One of our problems is that of choice.
There is an attempt to become better.
It is like making corrections for a lens.
The lens becomes not right for some reason, so it distorts whatever is seen through it.
We believe that the main duty, the chief work, of man is to make corrections until it is possible to transmit the right picture.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From Pebbles of Wisdom from Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz