Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

“These are the laws that you shall place before them” (Exodus 21:1).

Rabbi Simcha Bunem of Peshischa (b, 1765, Poland) writes about this opening verse to our Torah reading for the week:

“In the nations of the world, wise and discerning people create laws; the lawmakers exist first, and the laws follow. The Torah’s laws are fundamentally different. As the Zohar teaches, the Torah existed thousands of years before the world itself. Proverbs states, “By justice a king establishes the land” (Proverbs 24:9), meaning that all of creation rests upon the pillars of justice. This is the deeper meaning of “that you shall place before them” in the verse above: these laws were already established long before Israel existed. Nothing preceded creation except the Torah—the divine blueprint through which God shaped all existence.”

The implication of this teaching is profound: divine justice is woven into the very fabric of reality. Since the universe was formed according to the principles of the Torah, and the Torah embodies justice, the world itself reflects those principles. As the Maharal of Prague explains, “When one grasps something in the Torah, one grasps something about the entire order of reality, since the ways of this world emerge from the ways of the Torah.”

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