Machshavot HaLev - Yeshivat Lev HaTorah

106
בלה תובשחמ
our society one whose law is none other than the law of G-d, and privileges us
each individually to strive to live in accordance with the requirements of His law.
But receiving the law of G-d is a thunderous experience for a human being, an
experience described in our parsha in all of its overwhelming, supernatural glory.
The danger of receiving so fiery a law is that we may be overwhelmed by this
experience to the point of making the law the only standard for our behavior. As
the Gemara in Bava Metzia continues:
R. Yochanan said: “Jerusalem was destroyed only because they gave judgments in
it in accordance with the law of the Torah.”
Were they then to have judged in accordance with untrained arbitrators?
Rather, I will explain (the intention of R. Yochanan’s statement) in this way:
“Because they sufficed in their judgments with (the requirements of) the law of
the Torah, and they did not go beyond the requirements of the law.”
The Torah does not wish for us to build a society that suffices its moral urge
merely by upholding its norms. Perhaps this is the wisdom of referring here – at
the core of the very story about the foundation of the Torah’s courts of law – to
the need to go beyond the requirements of the law. Leadership in Klal Yisrael,
here epitomized by Moshe Rabbeinu, is obligated not only to transmit the chukim
and the torot, but also to educate toward right living, which may at times require
action beyond the requirement of mere law.
With this understanding of our passage’s message about the appropriate nature
of Torah leadership, we may also understand the seemingly unusual placement
of our section here, prior to the giving of the Torah, as well as the unusual choice
of a non-Jew as a mouthpiece for the transmission of details for how Torah law
is to be judged. Of course, the Jewish rule of law as judged in our courts must
be Torah law, and of course this law was received first only at Har Sinai. And of
course Torah law belongs uniquely to the Jewish people, and gentiles neither have
the obligation nor the privilege of building a society whose courts rule according
to the law of the Torah. The Torah’s placement of this section before Matan Torah,
and in the mouth of a non-Jew, is not meant to undermine these obvious facts,
but may serve to underscore for us the frame of mind that we must bring to the