Parashat Yitro: Torah from Sinai

(1) Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah.

(25) i.e. the oral law, which was received from generation to generation until Moses, as our Sages said (Pirkei Avot 1:1) "Moses received the torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua..." Because every commandment G-d gave to Moses was accompanied with an oral explanation and clarification. This is the oral law. And thus Moses transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, etc. For without an explanation we would not know how to do even one precept fully, i.e. to do it completely, such as Tzitzit, Tefilin, and likewise for all of the others. Then each person would explain the precepts in the torah according to his knowledge and understanding, and every Jew would have a different torah and a different religion. Therefore, our torah depends on the transmitted oral law which Moses received at Sinai and which was transmitted until it reached the place G-d chose [for His temple]. For there [in Jerusalem] are the true receivers of the oral tradition, the great Sanhedrin and the Kohanim (priests). Therefore, the torah says (Deut. 17:10-12) "you shall do according to the torah which they [the Sanhedrin] teach you. Be careful to do everything they instruct you to do...and the man which does not hearken unto the priest that stands to minister there before the L-ord your G-d, or unto the judge [of the Sanhedrin] - that man shall die"... And they also received from Moses all the great secrets which are known to true Kabalists, and the amazing allusions, for it is all hinted in the torah. The torah is expounded in 4 ways (Pardes) as explained in the Zohar, Ramban, and the Alshich. The author was brief here for he relied on the words of Rabbi Saadia Gaon.

(15) All the people witnessed the thunder [lit. the voices] and lightning, the blare [lit. a voice] of the horn [shofar] and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance.

(33) Support for this can be brought from Rosh's ruling on the commandment to write a Sefer Torah, in his Hilchot Sefer Torah, chap. 1:
Today, when we write Sifrei Torah and deposit them in synagogues … it is a positive commandment [incumbent] on every man in Israel who can afford to, to write [a copy of] the Pentateuch, Mishnah, Gemara, and Rashi's commentary, so that he and his children can study them. For the commandment to write the Torah is in order to use it to learn from, as is written (Devarim 31:19), "Teach it to the children of Israel, put it in their mouths." Through [studying] the Gemara and Rashi's commentary he will have a clear grasp of the reasons for the commandments and the laws: therefore, they are the very books that a man is commanded to write.
His ruling is cited by Tur and Shulchan Aruch in Yoreh De'ah 270:2. The achronim disagree as to whether according to Rosh there is no longer a commandment to write a Torah Scroll, which is the view of Prishah and Shach, or whether the original commandment is still in force but today there is an additional mitzvah to copy the other books, which is the opinion of Beit Yosef and Taz. All agree, however, that Rosh ruled that there is a positive commandment to write copies of the other books. The difficulty is that when the Torah was given at Sinai it was forbidden to transcribe the Oral Torah, as stated in Gittin 60b, "you are not permitted to write things that were spoken." How could there be a commandment to write what was forbidden to be written at the time the commandment was given? The answer must be that once written, the Oral Torah acquired the status of Written Torah.

(11) When the Torah was given, her tablets that were likened to virginity were broken. And the Holy One, blessed be He, again gave her to Israel to keep her. And the oral Torah is called Halachah given to Moses on Sinai. And the groom of the Torah broke her virginity [just like the first tablets were broken]. Whoever speaks ill of her and says that Torah is not {the same as the original}, since her tablets were broken, the Holy One, blessed be He, will speak to him, who is the girl's father, that daughter who is {hinted at} in the word בְּרֵאשִׁית (In the beginning). [ בְּרֵאשִׁית is spelled with the same letters as 'Bat Roshi', the daughter of my head. The Torah is therefore]the King's daughter. Then the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke: "And they shall spread the cloth" (Deuteronomy 22:17), and the parchment of the Torah scroll unfolds, and they shall see that it is written in it, "Hew for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write upon these tablets the words that were on