Question

Hello Rabbi,
One of the things that bothers me in the world of faith is the gap between the Hebrew Bible and the sources of the Sages, and in general the written Oral Torah down to our own day. The Hebrew Bible looks like a simple book that tells us many things that are not exactly of interest to Jewish law. It seems very strange to me that instead of throwing us hints about core principles on which major bodies of Torah law depend, it tells us in great detail about travel itineraries, exhausting chronicles, and endless lists of people who came up to the Land and of functionaries in the Temple. A huge amount of unrelated information. And even if we say that these things have meaning, even if it is not mystical, it still is not clear why that is more important than what Jewish law is actually up to its neck with in practice, the very thing Judaism has been built on today and for the past two thousand years. It really seems to me that these are two different Judaisms: that of the Hebrew Bible and that of the Sages. This really interferes with seeing the Torah as a source of authority. The same goes for ancient prophecies, about foreign nations or about specific events (really most prophecies, for anyone who looks carefully), full of parables and allegories that are indeed very beautiful, but it is not clear how this is Torah, and how it is connected to the Torah as we understand it today. It seems far too much to me that the Hebrew Bible devotes zero effort to matters of Jewish law and instead drills into us not to murder, rape, or burn children. Doesn’t that make the world of Jewish law as we conceive it seem detached from that ancient and binding thing?
If Jewish law really is not ancient, and Jewish existence in the Hebrew Bible was built on some kind of general covenant with God, together with moral and monotheistic ideas that were indeed unique in that world, but without a real life of Jewish law, without concretely defined commandments down to the details, then I do not find a serious reason to think that today it obligates me, if it did not obligate King David.