“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 the least troublesome.
What we call details, however, are only part of greater units which in turn combined in various ways into a single entity.
It is as though in examining 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 disturbing and would be accepted as intrinsic to the wondrousness of the whole”
From The Thirteen Petalled Rose, pp. 153–54. by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz.
