There is a warning at the heart of the covenant that has nothing to do with courts. It has to do with a woman weeping in a small room, and a child watching her weep, and no one else hearing.
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (Exodus 22:22) puts the warning in God's own voice: If thou impoverish her, beware; for if they rise up and cry against you in prayer before Me, I will hear the voice of their prayer, and will avenge them.
The Prayer That Reaches the Throne Directly
Most prayers travel slowly. They pass through angels, through kavannot, through the accumulated merit of our lives. But the cry of the widow and the orphan, the Targum teaches, rises straight. There is no filter between their tears and Heaven.
The reason is simple. The widow has already lost the one who would have defended her. The orphan has no father at the court gate. When no human advocate remains, God Himself takes the brief. He becomes, in the language of Psalms (Psalms 68:6), Father of orphans and Judge of widows.
Why the Threat Is Collective
Notice the plural. If they rise up and cry against you. A single widow's tears can summon divine consequence. Not against her oppressor alone — against the community that watched and did not intervene. Indifference is complicity in the Torah's accounting.
The Takeaway
The measure of a covenantal society is not its temples or its courts. It is the woman with no husband and the child with no father, and whether anyone in that community hears them before God has to.