Sorry, but you're retrojecting your Protestantism onto ancient Jews.
Israel was to set up courts in every city (with the largest being of course at Jerusalem) and the Torah obligated Jews to abide by their decisions. This authority exists today in the Battei Din (courts) and Torah decisors.
The Torah enjoins several commandments the details of which are not spelled out in the Written Torah. When the Torah says to "heave" certain things and "wave" others, what does that mean? It has to mean something, right? It was written by G-d; it can't merely use words arbitrarily. Clearly there was a ritual for "waving" and a ritual for "heaving." But we are never told what they are. Furthermore, we are told that in some rituals people were "waved." Surely Martin Luther and John Calvin didn't claim to know how to reproduce that ritual, did they?
Another good example is the laws of the Hebrew calendar. G-d didn't simply point to an Egyptian calendar hanging on the wall at the beginning of Exodus 12 and say "we'll call this the 'first month.'" The Egyptian calendar was a solar calendar. No, at the point in time described in the beginning of Exodus 12 G-d gave Moses a whole group of laws and regulation for correctly calculating the dates of the Jewish calendar. Those laws are found nowhere in the Written Torah or the rest of the Hebrew Bible, yet without them one could not observe a single Biblical feast. In fact, even those Protestants who practice a Judaeo-chrstian syncretism, while rejecting anything "not explicitly in the bible," nevertheless implicitly recognize the authority of the Oral Torah when they accept the current dates of the Jewish holidays hey celebrate.
And finally, the big two: 1)the Written Torah consists of nothing but a list of over 304,000 consonants. There are no vowels. There is no punctuation. The organization of these consonants into words with their proper verbal pronunciation come from the Oral Torah, without which the Written Torah would be indecipherable.
2)Before the invention of the printing press or even before the Torah had been translated into another language, it was transmitted from generation to generation by learned soferim (scribes) who wrote it by hand in accordance to the most minute of rules and regulations (none of which, again, are elucidated in the Written Torah). The rules include what skins may be used as writing parchment, which tendons may be used to stitch them together, and what juices may be used to compound the ink. And it dictates the sizes and shapes of the letters and the "crowns" attached to them. This is the source of every single Pentatueuch translation in history, and the correctness of every translation depends entirely and assumes fully that the method and oral laws which govern the writing of Torah Scrolls are 100% authentic and trustworthy. I know Protestants don't like to hear this kind of talk because the Catholic claim that "you wouldn't have the bible without us!" has turned them off, but there is absolutely no comparison with the Catholic claims. Without authentically G-d-given oral laws instructing how to copy out a kosher Torah Scroll there would be no Bibles in the world today . . . not one. And in case some of you may be unaware of it, this method of hand-writing Torah Scrolls has been followed continuously since Moses himself and it is these kosher Torah Scrolls that are ritually read in Jewish worship.
My ethno-cultural attachments to American Fundamentalist Protestantism sometimes distort my own beliefs and I'm sure many Protestants assume that I believe just as they do on everything. This is not true and, to tell the truth, some Catholic/Orthodox criticisms of Protestantism are valid. But their answer to Protestantism is so fallacious that it gives Oral Tradition a bad name.
Of course, what Protestants mean when they speak of "perspecuity of Scripture" is not any of these things but rather those matters pertaining to "salvation." This chrstian "salvation" is a will-o'-the-wisp about which all the various chrstians have never agreed and never will agree. It is the "new testament" that keeps all those who (at least in theory) fear the One True G-d divided and constantly at each others' throats. Just as the "Pharasaical legalism" which all chrstians so hypocritically denounce is exactly what G-d intended and what the world needs.
Maybe you'll believe it when 'Adam HaRi'shon is resurrected and tells you.
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>> “Just as the “Pharasaical legalism” which all chrstians so hypocritically denounce is exactly what G-d intended and what the world needs.” <<
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Nice try, but no cigar!
The King of Kings, and Lord of Lords is who denounced Phariseeism. Most “christians” ignorantly embrace it to their own destruction.
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