I’ve often wondered about my ancestors.

This is true in many different respects, but there is one particular feature of their tradition that gives me pause and makes me question what I know about them.

If you have spent any time around Orthodox or highly-observant Conservative Jews (which I have at times considered myself), you know that a myriad of minutely detailed, perhaps seemingly arbitrary, highly structured laws and practices govern practically our every move.

If you have been around us on the Sabbath (Shabbat), you know we don’t spend money, use electricity, drive, or carry things during the 25 hours encompassing that holy day. You may also know that, layered onto this process, we have various mechanisms to allow for comparable activities: elevators that stop on every floor so we don’t have to initiate the electricity; pre-purchased tickets for events so commerce isn’t required; and an eruv—a special, barely-noticeable enclosure (often in the form of a wire) that encircles a neighborhood, rendering carrying permitted.

I needn’t deeply explicate the many detailed dietary restrictions on top of this. Suffice it to note that pork and shellfish are off limits, along with mixtures of meat and milk (think: cheeseburger) that extend to prohibiting eating dairy products from the same dish that meat products touched.

This level of micromanagement of our every act extends to our prayer life as will. The very word for our prayer book—Siddur—comes from the word meaning “order.” Our every prayerful utterance is subject to highly ritualized order.

I could keep going. There is even a Jewish legislative prescription that insists we put our right shoe on before our left but tie our left shoe before our right.

All of this begs the obvious question.

Why?

Religion is supposed to deal with grave moral issues, isn’t it? How do we cope with life and death? What do we do about the injustices in our midst? How do we express gratitude or pray for healing? How do we better connect with our loved ones and with the Divine?

What does which shoe we put on first or the nature of the foods we eat have to do with these monumental questions?

On one level, the answer is simple and elegant. By having religious law govern even our most mundane moments, we are potentially in perpetual engagement with the Holy. To have all life refracted through a religious lens allows us to see God (whatever that may mean for us) in an an appreciable number of additional moments—moments that might otherwise be consumed by distractions or the regular rhythm of life. As my teacher Rabbi Jacob Staub puts it, “Noticing the blessings that inhere in things we might otherwise take for granted is an invitation to live in another realm of consciousness.”

This is a satisfying explanation for me. As someone easily distracted by phones and screens, podcasts and news feeds, being reminded of my relationship to the Divine at each and every moment is something for which I yearn.

And yet I also find myself wondering why the corpus of ritual law is as restrictive and intensely detailed as it is. Couldn’t the above (i.e. a consistent search for the Divine) be achieved with requirements that we, for example, simply say blessings before each act? Before eating, putting on shoes, and driving? How did we become so obsessed with how many hours one had to wait before eating dairy following a meat-based meal? Or exactly when we could start work again after the Sabbath?

Here I find a different motivation at work. In addition to facilitating our engagement with the Divine, these laws can also serve as an outlet for that inner voice inside of us that gnaws at us to do something. Some of us (ahem ahem) have a bit of a perpetual sense of existential angst—a restlessness that needs to be channeled somewhere. Some of us constantly clean or obsessively work out; others have halakhah, the Jewish set of laws and rituals that literally translates to something like “the pathway” or “the way to walk.”

Our ancestors created this, and I sometimes wonder whether they were motivated by similar impulses.

That said, perhaps the distinction I suggest—between interfacing with the Divine on the one hand, and serving as an outlet for existential angst on the other—is more illusory than it first appears.

Perhaps the existential angst is a symptom, or a product, of our perpetual, innate desire to be at one with the Divine. In that case, halakhah, ritual law, serves as an arena in which to play out this love affair. By having activities that we are required to conduct or are restricted from conducting, we have ethereal space in which to unfurl our love for God (or for whatever force we feel drives the universe).

This still doesn’t totally explain why our halakhah—our Jewish law—is exactly the way it is. There is no doubt the legal corpus has grown more coarse and rigid over time, perhaps an unfortunate human response in the face of uncertainty and despair to yearn for more order, more direction, more micromanagement.

Regardless of the exact nature of how our ritual law manifests, I see it as an opportunity to play out my inner yearning. For that, I have my ancestors to thank.