מוסר אויף שמות 21:1

And among the weighty [positive] commandments is not to have a trial in the courts of the idolaters (gentiles), as it is stated (Exodus 21:1), “And these are the judgments that you shall place in front of them” - “in front of them,” and not in front of the Canaanites. But rebels stumble in them. And we have already spoken about this transgression before.

However, it would be doing Moses a grave injustice to believe that he erred in the language he used vis-a-vis G–d, especially to have made the same mistake on four separate occasions! I therefore believe that what Moses wanted to know on those four occasions did not concern something in the future, but he wanted to make sure that G–d would explain something to him which He had told him previously but which Moses was not sure he had properly understood. When Pharaoh had decreed that the workload of the Jewish people be increased (Exodus 5,9) Moses suddenly entertained doubts whether he had properly understood G–d previously when He had told him to take the people out of Egypt. He thought that possibly G–d had not referred to a process that would take place immediately but only after some considerable time. He therefore wanted to know from G–d when this redemption would occur. G–d reassured him that he had understood quite correctly, i.e. that the redemption would occur עתה, now. When G–d suddenly afflicted Miriam without even telling Moses anything about the cause of it all, i.e. "G–d suddenly told Moses Aaron and Miriam: go to the Tent of Meeting," Moses was not sure why he had become involved in all this. There could have been two reasons for this: 1) They (Aaron and Miriam) were not considered fit to receive prophetic communications due to their ritual impurity, as suggested by Rashi on Numbers 12,4, and that on account of this they could hear a communication from G–d only through the mouth of Moses. 2) G–d meant to put down Aaron and Miriam, and by having Moses present at that time their embarassment would be commensurably greater. If that had been G–d's purpose their very embarassment would constitute part of their atonement. We have an example of such a consideration in Exodus 32,14 when the very fact that G–d had said that He would wipe out the Jewish people and replace them with a new nation based on Moses was part of the Israelites' atonement. The shame of having been found so unworthy compared to Moses was part of their punishment. As soon as Moses saw that Miriam had become afflicted with לפניהם he asked G–d to explain why he had been called out also, seeing that G–d was not satisfied with merely shaming Miriam in his presence. Once G–d told Moses that Miriam had to remain quarantined for seven days Moses realized that he had erred in his earlier assumption that maybe his presence was Miriam's atonement, but that the first possibility, Miriam's ritual impurity at the time, was the reason Moses had to be called out to be the intermediary for a communication from G–d to her and Aaron. Something of a similar nature took place when Moses appealed to G–d regarding his successor. In Exodus 21,1 G–d had told Moses to place the various laws before the Jewish people. The word לפניהם used by the Torah there is understood to refer to legal experts, Torah scholars, as opposed to laymen. If the process was initiated by G–d giving Moses סמיכה, ordination, then it could be presumed that from that time on this ordination would be conferred by one scholar on his disciple, etc. On the other hand it was possible that just as G–d had chosen Moses to be ordained for this task in his generation, so G–d would ordain other leaders each in their respective generations. Now that the time had come for Moses to pass from the scene he wanted to know from G–d how this process of ordination of a future leader would be handled. G–d therefore told him in Numbers 27,18 that he, Moses, was to confer this ordination on Joshua by placing his hand on him. In our פרשה, too, Moses had thought that there were indications that G–d had rescinded His decree that Moses would not lead the Jewish people into the Holy Land. Moses therefore asked G–d for clear guidance as to the true state of affairs. We note that in all the instances when Moses used the word לאמור when addressing G–d there was a perfectly legitimate reason.

In other words: דינים and משפטים, contribute to the respective perfection of the נשמה-גוף-ממון elements in our lives. משפטים are the mainstay of it all. Our sages say (Shemot Rabbah 30,3) that Torah (i.e. the Ten Commandments) is surrounded by דינים. The Torah begins with דינים, as we read in Exodus 15,25: שם שם לו חוק ומשפט, and it ends with דינים in Exodus chapter 21,1, (The letter ו in the words ואלההמשפטים, is regarded as a continuation of the Ten Commandments). You should know that there are two categories of דין. One category reflects only the attribute of Justice. The other category is a combination of the attribute of Justice and the attribute of Mercy. Our Rabbis have already said that originally G–d had planned to create a universe based on justice. However, G–d saw that such a universe would not endure, hence He co-opted the attribute of Mercy (Bereshit Rabbah 12,15). Just as the attribute of Mercy was invoked when creating man, so Torah itself reflects on occasion strict justice, and on other occasions justice tempered with mercy. As an example, consider the four possible ways of administering the death penalty to people guilty thereof, as opposed to the owner of an ox that has fatally gored a free human being repeatedly, so that the owner's negligence was the cause of what is described by the Torah as deserving the death penalty (Exodus 21,29), וגם בעליו יומת. Rashi explains that this death penalty is administered by Heaven, not by a human tribunal, i.e. the attribute of Mercy is invoked. A similar instance is the statement in the Torah: "An eye for an eye" (Exodus 21,24). This is understood by the Rabbis as referring to financial compensation to be paid to the person who has lost his eye (Baba Kama 84). The reason the Torah employs such severe sounding language, i.e. עין תחת עין, is to tell us that spoiling someone's eye deserves to be paid for by loss of one's own eye. Only because the attribute of Mercy has been co-opted, is restitution made in money, i.e. in terms of the monetary value of the eye one has destroyed.