Parshas Re’eh

Here is something that trips up a lot of people when they first encounter it. We tend to think of the Written Torah, the Five Books of Moshe, as the complete and primary source of Jewish law, with the Talmud and oral tradition playing a supporting role. This week’s Torah portion, Parshas Re’eh, contains a verse that quietly dismantles that assumption entirely.

The Torah commands us in Devarim 12:21 to slaughter animals “as I have commanded you.” But here is the problem. No such commandment appears anywhere in the written text. The Torah tells us to slaughter but never explains how. Rashi, citing the Sifrei and Tractate Chullin, points out that this is not an oversight. It is intentional. The laws of shechita, the precise regulations governing kosher slaughter, were given orally to Moshe at Sinai and transmitted through the oral tradition.

And shechita is far from the only example. The Torah commands us to wear tefillin but never describes what they look like or how they are made. It commands us to build a sukkah but gives almost none of the details required to actually build one. It tells us to write mezuzos on our doorposts without explaining what that means in practice. The written text assumes you already know. It is, as Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch puts it, essentially cliff notes for people who attended the lecture. The Written Torah was never designed to be understood in isolation. It was written for people who already possessed the Oral Torah and could read the written text in that light.

This reframes everything. The Oral Torah, the Mishna, the Gemara, the entire chain of transmission culminating in the Talmud and the halachic literature, is not a rabbinic addition layered on top of the real thing. It is the other half of a system Hashem deliberately designed as a unit. Removing the Oral Torah does not give you a purer or simpler Judaism. It gives you a text you cannot actually follow, because the instructions are incomplete without it.

There are those who claim they will follow the Written Torah alone and reject the Talmud as a human invention. But this verse in Re’eh, and dozens like it throughout the Torah, show that Hashem Himself built the system this way. The incompleteness of the written text is not a flaw. It is the design. It ensures that the Torah can only be properly transmitted through a living chain of teacher to student, generation to generation, exactly as Hashem intended at Sinai.

May Hashem help us appreciate the depth and wisdom of the complete Torah He gave us, written and oral together, and in that merit may we always merit to pass it on to the next generation whole and intact.