Re'eh

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Re'eh ('See', Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17) sets before Israel a blessing and a curse, commands the centralisation of worship at the place God will choose, and reviews the dietary laws, the tithes, the sabbatical release of debts, and the three pilgrimage festivals.

Re'eh's demand that sacrifice be offered only 'at the place the Lord your God will choose' (12:5, repeated some twenty times through the parashah) is the single passage on which the critical case for dating Deuteronomy rests most heavily: 2 Kings 23 describes King Josiah, after the law scroll's discovery, closing down the local shrines ('high places') across Judah and centralising worship at Jerusalem, an act many scholars read as putting this very demand into practice for the first time, rather than restoring an older norm. The dietary laws that follow (14:3-21) largely parallel Leviticus 11, and the relationship between the two lists, which drew on which, or whether both drew on a common older source, remains a genuinely disputed question in Pentateuchal scholarship rather than a settled one.

Re'eh legislates the case of an entire Israelite town whose inhabitants turn to idol worship, commanding that such a condemned city (ir hanidachat) be utterly destroyed along with all its property (Deuteronomy 13:13-19). The Mishnah's tractate Sanhedrin surrounds the law with conditions so exacting, requiring, among other things, that a majority of the town's residents be idolaters and that the specific legal warnings and witnesses required for individual capital cases be independently established for every single inhabitant, that a well known rabbinic statement concludes the law 'never was and never will be,' existing in the Torah only so that its lesson could be studied rather than to be carried out.

Source critics generally read this law, together with Re'eh's demand that sacrifice be offered only at the divinely chosen place, as part of Deuteronomy's sustained programme against rival worship, whether foreign gods or unauthorised local shrines, a concern many scholars connect to the same historical setting proposed for Deuteronomy's centralisation law more broadly, a kingdom seeking to eliminate competing religious loyalties rather than a wilderness generation facing an immediate practical threat.