Oral law

So what exactly is this Simchat Torah, this joy of Torah? What are we dancing with? Most people hear the word Torah and think of the five books of Moses, but Torah is far more than that.

There's a written law, an oral law, a Mishnah, and a Talmud, an entire system of transmission and interpretation that stretches from Sinai to today.

There are moments in Jewish history when the Torah was nearly lost, and extraordinary figures who fought to preserve it.

There are questions worth asking about how we know the text we have today is accurate, and what the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed about that.

Those are the holy texts of Judaism.

The later books beginning with the book of Joshua and ending with the book of Chronicles that are subdivided into books of prophets and the books of the writing.

Or it could be expanded out to a topic which people are much less familiar with, which is called the Torah Shabal Peh, the oral law, which is how you actually live as a Jew, the practical application of Judaism on every level, spiritually and legally, in terms of laws between us and God and each other.

It could also refer to later rabbinic writings because of the written law, the oral law, and pretty much anyone who writes in the area of Judaism today, you know, as a rabbi, it's considered Torah in the broadest

Now the beliefs.

The single most important difference is the oral law.

This is the Pharisees' most outstanding characteristic.

They held that alongside the written Torah, Moses received an oral law at Sinai, and that this oral law is as binding as scripture itself.

That's a massive claim.

It's the whole ballgame.

So, what's the actual difference? The difference may be that for the Sadducees, everything had to be derived exegetically from the Torah itself.

You could have rules, but they had to be pulled out of the text.