When Yitro comes to meet with Moses and sees that Moses took all the responsibility for helping the Jewish people in spiritual and legal matters, he advised him: “what you are doing is not good.”(Shemot 18:17)
Yitro realized that that heavy load would eventually wear Moses out. Therefore he advised him to build courts of justice in which he would choose Prophetically amongst the entire people “men of wealth, who are G-d fearing, men of integrity who despise monetary gain, and appoint them as officers of thousands, officers of hundreds, officers of fifty and officers of ten.”(Shemot 18:21)
Moses would now be in charge of the most complicated cases and the rest would go in hierarchy of importance.
Yitro set the basis for our Judicial system till now a days.
The whole purpose for this teaches a very important lesson. If we see chronologically this episode happened before the giving of the Torah. G-d wants human beings to be in charge of their lives, He wants us to be responsible and accountable of our actions and He gives humanity the ability to rule in this realm. Everything we have down here is a reflection of what goes up there, for when a person is being judged in this world he really is being judged in the upper realm too.
Our Mitzvahs are our defending witnesses and advocates, our bad deeds are our prosecutors and H”S is the ultimate judge. The Torah is our legal code of law in which H”S tells us how we should live in a moral and just way.
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