Notes from the Underground

"Peret karmicha lo ti'lakeit..."  The Noam Elimelech sees the kerem, the vineyard, described in these pesukim as an allusion to the tzadik who is filled with good deeds.  Peret = pratiyus, focusing on the details, as opposed to the klal, the bigger picture.  Isiah Berlin has a famous essay (no, the Noam Elimelech did not say this part) in which is contrasts the fox and the hedgehog.  The fox knows many little things; his worldview is shaped by the amalgamation of many isolated, individual details that he somehow fits together, sometimes neatly, sometimes not so neatly.  The hedgehog knows one thing -- a hedgehog thinker sees everything through the lens of one overarching principle that then colors and shapes how he sees all the details.  A person can get lost in the myriad details of halacha -- we have peratim and we have pratei pratim for every single mitzvah.  We can become foxes to an extreme.  The Torah here is perhaps warning us that we also sometimes need to take a step back and learn from the hedgehog.  Don't get lost in pratiyus.  You have to have a bigger picture in life, a framework in which to hang all those details.  Knowing every Pri Megadim in Shulchan Aruch is great, but you have to have a vision of what avodas Hashem is all about, what values the halacha is trying to inculcate. Without vision, without a grasp of the larger picture, a person can get lost.