If G‑d Is Great, Why Is He So Fussy About Details?

David Stauber received a yeshiva education in Brooklyn in his youth. He learned all the dos and don'ts. But not the whys. The only motivation for keeping anything Jewish was the punishment for doing otherwise.

David never understood why G‑d was so grumpy about what seemed to be petty details. If G‑d is such a big G‑d, why is He so bothered because you used the meat spoon in a tub of cottage cheese?

By adulthood, all that was left of David’s Judaism was his fast on Yom Kippur. But then, one evening, he found himself bringing his wife and father-in-law for a private audience with the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson.

Protocol requires that you hand the Rebbe a note with your name and questions upon entering. So David wrote his question: “If G‑d is so great, why does He insist on all these tiny details?”

The three entered. Once he had everyone’s names and notes, the Rebbe turned to David and said, “I don’t understand your question.”

David began to repeat the question in Yiddish. The Rebbe gently raised his hand to halt him in mid-sentence.

The Rebbe explained, “It’s not for G‑d. It’s for us. G‑d wants us to be close to Him, and this is the path He gives us.”

Channels of Love

David later recounted, “I felt as though I had been in a dark room and the Rebbe had turned on the light.”

David had likely understood that these rules and prohibitions were just G‑d’s personal preferences. Somehow, mixing meat and milk bothered Him—a lot. If you wanted to be on His good side, you had to avoid things He didn’t like.

The Rebbe opened up an entirely different vista. G‑d has no needs. Nothing bothers Him. But G‑d wants us to be close to Him. He is very big, and we are very small. So He opened a channel for us to connect with Him: 613 mitzvah channels with all their details and specifications.

That being so, as David later put it, halachah is not about subservience, wrath, and punishment. It’s about G‑d’s love for us.

Why the Details?

How does this explain why the mitzvahs are so exacting? Simple:

If these were the personal preferences of some human-like deity, then you could use your intuition to determine what is essential, what’s secondary, and what are insignificant details. You could ask, “Why does he need this? What’s driving him? How can I best satisfy him?”

But G‑d is fundamentally unreachable. We call Him “the Infinite.” Intuitively, there shouldn’t be any path to closeness to an infinite G‑d. The only reason this path exists is because He wills it to exist.

That being so, intuition is out the window. If we applied our reasoning to these matters, we would be creating a path not to Him but to ourselves.

We can apply intuition to human rules because they orbit around utility and function. But these rules, every detail of them, are composed of raw love and a divine desire. There’s no need to fill, no emotion to be assuaged. He’s giving you Himself, all of Him. Nothing is petty, nothing insignificant.

Indeed, what’s most wondrous about this path is that it contains anything at all that we can understand.

Back to the Details

Now, back to those details with the cottage cheese and the spoon used for meat—or any other details: A single deformed letter in a mezuzah. A flick of the switch on Shabbat. A bite the size of a fig on Yom Kippur. All of these are of major consequence when it comes to the channels G‑d has set up for us to connect with Him.

Why does G‑d choose to be found in the details? Is there a message here?

It’s quite simple now:

If you think of G‑d as very big, then you expect to find Him in big things.

If you think of Him as very spiritual, then you expect to find Him in spiritual things.

If you think of Him as exceedingly wise, then you will only search for Him within wisdom.

Whatever frame you’ve placed around G‑d, whatever image you’ve imposed upon Him, that’s going to determine your expectations of where you need to go to connect with Him.

But when you discover that G‑d is most found in practical details of everyday life, that forces you to rethink all those neat descriptions of where He lives and what He is. Your only way to understand this is to realize that He’s not big or small, far or close, physical or spiritual. He is everywhere, and He is found in everything.

As the Zohar puts it, there is no place void of Him. Every event of this world is an opportunity to find Him and every detail is a portal to connect.

Even your cottage cheese.