Summary
A general warning to be on your best behavior is given.
The Jews are told at some point in a future time they will have a Temple in a spot not yet revealed to them, which ultimately becomes Jerusalem.
The Jews are given the command of how to prepare animals to be eaten in a kosher way.
A warning not to follow false prophets and how to deal with them is given.
Some general guidelines on how to be a holy people are given: what animals are kosher to eat, don’t oppress weak people, loan to poor people and forgive debts after the sabbatical year, keep the holidays.
My analysis:
If you ever get to sit down and read the Tanakh cover to cover (unfortunately most Jews, even many Orthodox Jewish scholars, never get to do this), you will notice that there seem to be many inconsistencies and holes left in the text. You might also notice that many of the ideas in my posts don’t seem readily apparent. There’s a very good reason for this. The Tanakh, the written Bible, is actually like a set of Cliff’s Notes (Spark Notes? I don’t know what people are using these days) to a much larger body of Jewish tradition called the Oral Law. The Mishnah, Gemara (Talmud), Zohar and Midrashim are all early works preserving some of the traditions while others have been recorded later on as people were concerned they would be forgotten. However, there isn’t any explicit statements saying that such a thing exists. We only know it exists from two things: common sense and scriptural allusions.
The common sense aspect was articulated by our great rabbi Hillel, of Hillel sandwich fame from the Maxwell Hagadah that seems to be at almost every Passover Seder table in America. Someone wanted him to prove the Oral Law so he sat down and taught him all of the letters and their sounds. The next day when he reviewed the lesson he changed all the names of the letters, thus proving there had to be an Oral tradition telling us the names and sounds of the letters and by extension the meaning of everything else in our tradition.
The second are these textual allusions I mentioned, which are a bit more difficult to pull out. One of the major allusions is found right here in this Torah portion-the commandment of how to properly slaughter animals. The Torah says to slaughter them “as I have told you.” However, it is not as simple as this. The word caasher, almost always translated as “as” doesn’t mean “as” in the comparative sense. An accurate way to translate this word means “in the way” or “in the manner”. It never says how to slaughter animals for food even though it says G-d told us that.
There was a rabbi by the name of Ben Bag Bag (or maybe it was Ben Hei Hei I need to check) in the Mishnah of Avot that said turn the pages because it is all in there. What’s in there is a record of the first thousand years of our history and there’s a lot to it. I’m just giving a little taste through my posts.
