  What ties together these three prerequisites is Halevi's attempt to give both actual and specific content to what the philosopher sketched out only in broad outline. His emphasis on specific ancestry and lineage was surely intended to call attention to actual people whose lives were characterized by special relationships that could affect the course of history and, as a result, to reconnect one's own life with theirs. His emphasis on a particular geographical environment was plainly intended to renew and strengthen his people's sense of connection to and love for their ancestral home and, given both the dialogue's ending and Halevi's own choice, a willingness to return it. His emphasis, finally, on the commandments as the clearest embodiments of what is pleasing to God was clearly meant to nourish not only respect for the nobility of Israel's ancestral way of life, but also to encourage renewed commitment to that life as defined by worthy deeds and self-mastery over and above pleasing intentions and intellectually respectable opinions. By the same token, his elaboration of these prerequisites over the course of the dialogue may also be intended as a critique of philosophy in the sense that it is by its very nature unable to provide more than general principles and guidelines in the realm of action. Its preoccupation with the search for universals inevitably finds claims about special qualities, places, relationships and actions to be, more often than not, problematic or naïve, and what Halevi would regard as appropriate concern with matters of detail, outside its purview.