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.