Required: Reading and Hearing
Read: Yaakov is cooking food; Eisav comes home tired and hungry, asks his brother for some food; Yaakov gives him food in exchange for the Birthright.

Hear: Yaakov was preparing the mourner's first meal for his father Yitzchak, since Avraham Avinu had died that very day; Eisav returns home, having committed several serious sins, and Yaakov succeeds in getting the B'chora, which should be his, from Eisav, who is totally unworthy of it.
Read: Do not cook a baby goat in its own mother's milk.

Hear: Do not cook the meat of cow, goat, or sheep in the milk of cow, goat, or sheep. Do not eat such mixtures. Do not derive benefit from such mixtures.

The Torah is read by many people, among whom are non-Jews and Jews who are not committed to the Oral Law and Tradition. They read, but they don't hear. And therefore, their reading is very often a distortion of the Truth of the Torah. The Torah was never meant to be just read. It is not meant to be understood without the combination of the Written Word and the Oral Torah.

That this is so, is patently obvious to Torah-true Jews, from countless examples in both the halachic aspects of Torah (like the meat-in-milk example) and in the Aggadic aspects of Torah (like the Yaakov-Eisav example).

There is a Midrash P'li'a that says that when G-d dictated the pasuk to Moshe about the baby goat in its mother's milk and explained to him about the laws of meat-in-milk, Moshe requested to write "Meat in Milk", rather than the cryptic G'DI BACHALEIV IMO. G-d said: K'TAV L'CHA ET HAD'VARIM HA'EILEH, You write these exact words. People must READ the Torah and they must HEAR its meaning and understanding from the bona fide links of the Chain of Tradition - the Jewish sages and scholars throughout the generations. Torah was always meant by G-d to be transmitted teacher to student, from Moshe to Yehoshua... to each of us.