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. Ki Teitzei ('When You Go Out', Deuteronomy 21:10-25:19) contains more distinct commandments than any other parashah, on the captive woman, the wayward son, lost property, the wages of the poor, honest weights, divorce and marriage, and levirate duty, and closes with the charge to remember and blot out Amalek.
Ki Teitzei contains more individual commandments than any other weekly portion, seventy-four by the traditional count of the medieval Sefer HaChinuch (though Maimonides omits two, counting seventy-two), close to an eighth of the 613 commandments the rabbinic tradition finds in the whole Torah packed into a single reading. Its laws cluster overwhelmingly around the ordinary frictions of household and neighbour, lost property, a roof's safety fence, honest weights, a hired labourer's wages, rather than temple ritual, and the sheer density has made the portion a frequent starting point in later Jewish ethical and legal literature for organising commandments by social relationship rather than by cultic category.