Why does Rashi say the world was created for the sake of the Torah?

Rashi opens his entire commentary on the Torah with a question that sounds strange until you sit with it: why does the Torah begin with the story of creation at all, rather than with the first commandment given to Israel — since the Torah is fundamentally a book of law? His answer, citing the sages before him, is that the creation account establishes something the law alone couldn’t: it explains why the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, by establishing that God, as creator of the whole world, has the right to give any part of it to whomever He chooses. Within that discussion Rashi cites the teaching that the world was created “for the sake of the Torah, which is called (Proverbs 8:22) ‘the beginning (reshith) of His way,’ and for the sake of Israel, who are called (Jeremiah 2:3) ‘the beginning (reshith) of His increase.’” Both Torah and Israel are called by the Hebrew word reshith, “beginning” — the same word that opens Genesis 1:1, bereshit. Rashi’s point isn’t a claim about physics or chronology; it’s a claim about purpose. Creation isn’t presented as an end in itself but as the necessary stage-setting for two things the rest of the Torah is actually about: a people bound to God’s law, and a law that gives that people’s existence its meaning. Read this way, Genesis 1 is less a science of origins than a legal preamble — establishing the standing on which the rest of the case, Israel’s covenant with the Torah, can even be argued.