Leviticus 11:20-25: in context

This is a scrap of the dietary law, and it is about which insects an Israelite could eat. Most winged crawling insects, it says, are off-limits and detestable, but there is an exception, and the exception is oddly specific: the ones with jointed legs for hopping, the locust, the katydid, the cricket, the grasshopper, those are permitted. Everything else that swarms on the ground is not. Touch the carcass of the wrong kind and you are unclean until evening; carry it and you must wash your clothes.

To a modern reader this is genuinely strange, a level of attention to insects that seems almost absurd. But the strangeness is part of the point. These food laws ran through every ordinary day of an Israelite's life, turning the most mundane act, deciding what to eat, into a small moment of belonging to God rather than to the nations around them. Holiness here is not built out of grand gestures. It is built out of thousands of tiny distinctions, drawn carefully through things most people never think about twice. The law assumes nothing is too small to be brought under the question of what is clean and what is not, right down to which insects hop.

We tend to reserve our carefulness for the big decisions and let the small, daily, invisible ones run on their own. This law assumes the opposite, that a life is actually shaped in the tiny choices no one else notices. Where have I saved all my attention for the large moments, while letting the small daily distinctions, the ones that quietly form me, go completely unexamined?