Five minutes, nothing assumed
Start here.
You do not need to know anything before reading this. Not a word of Hebrew, not a single name, not one date. By the end of this page you will know what the seven laws are, where they come from, and what to do next.
What this is
There is an old Jewish teaching that seven laws were given to every human being, not to a nation and not to a religion. They are called the seven laws of the sons of Noach, after the man who survived the flood, because in the Torah’s account everybody alive is descended from him.
They are not a shortened version of Judaism for people who did not make the cut. They are their own thing, given to their own audience, with their own purpose, and that audience is you.
The seven, right now
Here they are, in the order the tradition gives them. Read them once quickly. You already agree with most of this, and that is not a problem, it is the starting point.
- 1. Recognise the One G-d, and worship nothing elseThere is one G-d who made everything, and nothing inside the world is to be served as though it made you.
- 2. Treat the Name of G-d with reverenceThe Name of G-d is not to be used as a weapon, a curse, or a throwaway, and reverence in speech is the first place reverence becomes real.
- 3. Do not murderA human life is not yours to take, because a human being is not a thing that belongs to anyone.
- 4. Guard the boundaries of sex and familyThere are lines around sex, and they exist so that a household can be a place a child is safe to arrive into.
- 5. Do not stealWhat is not yours stays not yours, whether you take it by force, by stealth, by contract, or by simply never paying for it.
- 6. Do not eat flesh torn from a living animalYou may eat meat, and you may not tear it from an animal that is still alive.
- 7. Establish courts of justiceEvery society is obliged to set up real courts, so that the other six are not merely opinions.
Notice the shape
Six of those are things not to do. Only the seventh asks you to make something that was not there before. That is not an accident of drafting. It is the whole architecture, and it is worth saying plainly: six laws clear a space, and the seventh builds inside it.
Where they come from
All seven are read out of one sentence in the opening pages of the Torah, spoken to the very first human being, about which fruit he may eat.
וַיְצַו ה׳ אֱלֹקִים עַל הָאָדָם לֵאמֹר מִכֹּל עֵץ הַגָּן אָכֹל תֹּאכֵל
vayetzav Hashem Elokim al ha'adam leimor, mikol etz hagan achol tochel
And the L-rd G-d commanded the man, saying: of every tree of the garden you may surely eat.
The Talmud, the great record of rabbinic discussion, takes that sentence apart clause by clause and finds one of the seven laws in each clause. That reading is at Sanhedrin 56b, and the whole of why seven walks through it slowly.
A word you will meet everywhere
a commandment
מצוהmitzvah
Often used in English to mean a good deed, which loses the point. It means a commandment. Chassidic teaching connects the word to an Aramaic root meaning joining, so that a commandment is a place arranged in advance where two parties meet.
Every Hebrew word on this site is introduced the way that one just was: English meaning first, then the script, then how it sounds, then a line of help. You will never be expected to already know a word. If you meet one you have forgotten, the glossary has all of them in one place.
Why it matters that they were commanded
This is the part most people find strange, and it is the heart of the whole thing. The tradition holds that keeping these seven because they were commanded is different from arriving at the same seven by your own good reasoning, even though the actions are identical.
The reason is not about credit. Picture two rooms, the same table, the same chairs, the same bread. In the first, someone arranged the room to please themselves. In the second, someone prepared the room because a guest is coming. Every detail is the same. Only one of them is a home, and the difference is not in the room. It is in whether the room is turned toward someone.
What this site will not do
It will not ask you to convert. It is not a first step toward becoming Jewish, and the tradition does not want that from you. It will not speak badly of anybody else’s religion or people. It will not rule on Jewish law or answer a question about your own situation, because that takes a rabbi who can hear the actual facts.
What to do next
Read one law properly. Not all seven. One. Each page takes about eight minutes and has the same eight parts: the law in a sentence, where it comes from, what it asks, what it does not ask, the deeper layer, one practice for the week, the questions people ask, and where it sits among the others.
If you have no idea which one, start with the seventh, because it is the one nobody expects.