User Guide
"On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." — Matthew 22:40. Sorting Torah is an interactive canvas where you physically hang the Ten Commandments and the laws of Moses on the two Great Commandments, exploring how every law finds its root in love of God or love of neighbor.
01 The Canvas
When the splash screen closes, you'll see two large navy tiles — the First Commandment (Love the Lord your God) on the left and the Second Commandment (Love your Neighbor) on the right. Each has a gold hook at its base — this is where tiles hang.
Along the right edge is the Unplaced deck, holding all 613 tiles: the Ten Commandments and 603 laws of Moses, arranged in the order they appear in Scripture from Genesis through Deuteronomy. Your task is to hang each tile on the hook that fits best — though there's no single right answer. This is a reflective exercise, not a quiz.
Use the search bar at the top of the deck to filter tiles by keyword. The book filter dropdown narrows the deck to laws from a specific book — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, or Deuteronomy.
The header bar at the top of the canvas shows the Matthew 22:40 passage. Click it at any time to read the full Matthew 22:37–40 text and add your own reflection on the two Great Commandments.
02 Hanging & Chaining Tiles
Drag any tile from the deck toward a hook — the hook glows gold when you're close. Release the tile over the hook to hang it. The tile will snap into place and a connector line will appear, showing the relationship.
Each commandment tile (I–X) has its own hook at the bottom, so laws can hang from commandments. The two pillar hooks accept any tile directly.
Tiles can chain — hang a tile from another tile's hook to build a tree of relationships. You can attach as many tiles as you like to any hook. To move a tile, drag it off its current position and drop it onto a new hook. Entire subtrees move with their parent tile — every child follows automatically.
To remove a placed tile, hover over it on the canvas. A trash icon appears in the bottom-right corner of the tile. Click it to remove the tile. If the tile has no children, it returns to the deck immediately. If it has children, a prompt appears with three options:
- Return children to deck — the removed tile and all tiles hanging below it go back to the deck, available to place again.
- Reconnect children to grandparent — only the selected tile is removed. Its direct children are re-attached to its parent, preserving the rest of the branch structure intact.
- Remove tile and all children — the tile and its entire subtree are cleared from the canvas permanently. Use Undo to recover if needed.
03 Reordering Tiles
When a tile is dropped onto a hook it is automatically selected (shown with a gold ring). While selected, press the Left or Right arrow keys to shift the tile one position among its siblings. The canvas smoothly animates to the new arrangement.
To reorder several tiles at once, Shift+Click each tile you want to move — all selected tiles must be siblings under the same parent. Then press Left or Right to move them as a group. The selected tiles maintain their relative order to each other and step past one unselected sibling per keypress. Pressing an arrow key at the edge (leftmost or rightmost position) does nothing.
The selection stays active after each keypress so you can tap the arrow key repeatedly to keep repositioning. Press Escape or click the canvas background to clear the selection when you're done.
04 Reading & Reflecting
Click any tile (without dragging) to open its detail panel. You'll see the full text of the commandment or law, its scriptural reference, and a Your Reflection field where you can write a personal note. Notes are saved automatically to your browser as you type.
A small note icon appears in the bottom-left corner of a tile whenever a reflection has been saved for it — a quick visual reminder of where your thoughts are recorded.
Use the reflection space to journal why you placed a tile where you did, or to record observations about how the law relates to its commandment.
05 Color Legend
Each tile can be highlighted with a color to help you group and categorize laws visually. Click the color swatch on any tile to cycle through available colors — or remove the color by cycling back to the default. The Legend panel in the top-left of the canvas shows all active colors. Available colors are: Blue, Yellow, Gold, Green, Lavender, Red, and Gray.
Click any label in the legend to rename it (e.g., "Worship," "Justice," "Purity"). Labels save automatically and are included when you publish a workspace.
Showing and hiding by color — Each legend row has an eye icon that appears on hover. Click it to hide all tiles of that color from the canvas view. Hidden tiles are not deleted — their children collapse up to the nearest visible ancestor, preserving the visual structure. Click the eye again to restore them. Colors can be toggled independently.
An Uncategorized row at the top of the legend controls tiles that have no color assigned. The legend panel itself can be collapsed using the chevron at its top.
06 Navigating the Canvas
| Action | How |
|---|---|
| Pan the canvas | Click and drag the background · Two-finger swipe |
| Zoom in | + button · Pinch out · Double-click the canvas |
| Zoom out | − button · Pinch in · Shift + double-click |
| Zoom presets | Click the % label between + − to choose 25%–150% |
| Zoom to area | Hold ⌘ (Mac) or Ctrl (Win/Linux) and drag a selection rectangle over any area |
| Recenter | Click the crosshair button next to zoom controls |
| Reorder tile left | ← arrow key (tile must be selected) |
| Reorder tile right | → arrow key (tile must be selected) |
| Undo | ⌘Z / Ctrl Z · Undo button (↩) above zoom controls |
| Redo | ⌘⇧Z / Ctrl Shift Z · Redo button (↪) above zoom controls |
Double-clicking zooms in 15% toward your cursor. Holding Shift while double-clicking zooms out 15%. The marquee zoom (⌘/Ctrl drag) draws a gold dashed rectangle — on release, the canvas smoothly animates to fill that exact region. Zoom is always clamped between 20% and 150%.
Undo and redo track tile placements and removals, up to 50 steps. They do not track zoom, pan, color, or note changes.
06b Tips & Tricks
Highlight Multiple Tiles at Once
Hold Shift and click tiles to select more than one — a gold ring marks each selected tile. Click any selected tile (without Shift) to open the bulk color panel and apply a highlight to all of them in one click. Press Escape or click the canvas background to clear the selection.
Filter by Color Before Exporting
Use the eye icons in the Legend to hide any color categories you don't want in your exported image. Only visible tiles appear in the download — useful for sharing a focused subset of your arrangement.
Use "Start from Here" to Build on Others' Work
When viewing any published workspace, click Start from Here in the welcome panel to copy that layout into your own local workspace. You can then rearrange, re-color, and reflect on it freely without affecting the original.
07 Exporting
Click the download icon in the header bar to save your current canvas as a PNG image. The deck, legend, and controls are hidden from the export automatically — only the tile tree and connector lines are captured.
To compose a specific view before exporting: use the legend's eye toggles to show only the colors you want, then zoom and pan to frame the area, and click the download icon. The full stage content is captured at 2× resolution for sharp, retina-quality output.
08 Sharing & Publishing
Click Publish in the header bar to create a permanent, shareable version of your canvas. Publishing captures your full workspace — tile placements, colors, legend labels, reflection notes, and zoom position — and saves it with a unique URL you can share with anyone.
When publishing you can optionally add:
- Workspace name — a title for your arrangement
- Church association — the congregation or group you're part of
- Welcome message — a note shown to visitors when they open your workspace
- Final reflection — your overall thoughts on the sorting exercise
Check List in the directory to have your workspace appear in the Directory. The Directory is a browsable collection of published workspaces — click Directory in the header bar to explore them. Each entry opens in a new tab so your own workspace stays open.
Published workspaces are read-only for visitors by default. Your local canvas continues to be editable and saves separately in your browser.
Start from Here — When viewing any shared workspace, click Start from Here in the welcome panel to copy that layout into your own personal workspace as a starting point. Your browser's local workspace is replaced with the shared arrangement, and you can then edit it freely without affecting the original.
Editable workspaces — When publishing, check Allow editing to let collaborators update the workspace. You'll be asked to set an edit code — a private passphrase you share with collaborators. Anyone with the code can click Unlock to Edit in the header bar, enter the code, and then use the ↑ Sync button to push their changes back to the published workspace. The edit code is never stored in plain text; keep a copy somewhere safe.
09 Your Progress
Everything is saved automatically — tile placement, colors, legend labels, zoom level, pan position, and all your reflection notes. If you close the tab or refresh the page, your canvas is exactly where you left it when you return. This data stays in your browser and is never sent to a server.
To start over, click the reset icon (bottom left, above the zoom controls). You'll be asked to confirm before anything is cleared.
10 One Law, Many Cases: The Torah's Legal Architecture
The Torah is often thought of as a book of rules — a long list of do's and don'ts handed down from Sinai. But a closer look reveals something far more sophisticated. Many of what we count as single laws actually contain multiple applications within them, each addressing a slightly different scenario while expressing the same underlying principle. Think of it like a master key that opens several different doors — the key is one, but its usefulness is demonstrated across many situations.
Before going further, it is worth pausing on a word. We commonly call these rules "laws," but that label may actually mislead us. The Hebrew word Torah itself means teaching or instruction — not law in the modern sense. The Torah reads less like a statute book and more like a court drama — God as the ultimate judge, Moses as the mediating advocate, and the people as a community receiving practical guidance for real life situations. The cases presented are live scenarios, and their outcomes become instructional precedents. With that in mind, the word instruction is arguably more faithful to what the text is actually doing than the word law, which imports connotations of rigid codification and impersonal enforcement that the Hebrew never intended.
A simple example makes this clear. In Exodus 22:1, the Torah states that a thief who steals and sells an ox must repay five oxen, while a thief who steals a sheep must repay four. One instruction, two cases, two different penalties. Neither case cancels the other out — they operate independently, they do not contradict each other, and if one were somehow set aside, the other would stand perfectly on its own. This pattern repeats itself throughout the Torah hundreds of times, across property law, purity law, agricultural law, and laws governing personal injury. Scholars estimate that as many as a third of all 613 commandments contain this kind of multi-case structure.
This approach actually makes the Torah remarkably practical. Rather than stating broad abstract principles and leaving people to figure out the details, the Torah walks through concrete real-world scenarios. Different animals, different relationships, different levels of wealth, different degrees of negligence — each gets its own ruling. The result is an instructional framework that is both principled and precise, accessible to ordinary people while remaining rigorous enough to satisfy the most demanding legal minds.
For the Deep Thinkers
The technical term for this legislative style is casuistic law — from the Latin casus, meaning "case" — as distinguished from apodictic law, which issues absolute commands without condition (e.g., "Thou shalt not murder"). The Covenant Code of Exodus 21–23 is widely recognized by biblical scholars as one of the densest concentrations of casuistic formulation in the ancient Near East, bearing structural similarities to the Code of Hammurabi while remaining legally and theologically distinct.
What makes the Torah's casuistic structure particularly remarkable is its built-in severability — a principle the Talmud encodes in the maxim ein lomedin min ha-k'lalot ("one does not derive specific laws from general principles alone"), found in tractate Kiddushin 34a and elsewhere. This forces each case to stand on its own legal footing, which in turn means that the enumeration of multiple applications within a single commandment is not stylistic redundancy but juridical necessity.
The differing penalties between cases — such as the 5:1 versus 4:1 restitution ratios for ox and sheep theft — further confirm this, since neither ratio can be logically derived from the other, establishing what Rishonim such as Nachmanides (Ramban) would recognize as independent legal obligations sharing a common moral root. Tellingly, even the word most translated as "law" — Torah itself — means teaching or instruction in Hebrew, suggesting that the entire casuistic enterprise is better understood as a divinely authored instructional curriculum than a civil legal code, a distinction that reframes not only how we read individual passages but how we understand the entire Sinai covenant.
11 FAQs
How do I keep my own workspace?
Your workspace saves automatically to your browser as you work — every tile placement, color, note, and zoom position. As long as you return to Sorting Torah in the same browser on the same device, your progress will be there. To back it up permanently, click Publish to create a shareable snapshot you can always return to.
How do I manage multiple workspaces?
Your browser holds one local workspace at a time, but you can maintain as many saved workspaces as you like using publishing. For each workspace you want to preserve:
- Click Publish and leave List in the directory unchecked — this keeps it private and unlisted.
- Check Allow editing and set an edit code so you can update it later.
- Save the URL — bookmark it or store it somewhere safe. That URL is your permanent link back to that workspace.
To work on a saved workspace, open its URL, then click Unlock to Edit and enter your edit code. When you're done, hit ↑ Sync to save your changes back. Repeat for as many workspaces as you need.
How do I collaborate with others?
When you publish a workspace, check Allow editing and set an edit code — a private passphrase you share with your collaborators. Anyone with the link and code can:
- Open the shared URL and click Unlock to Edit in the header bar.
- Enter the edit code to enable editing.
- Make changes — move tiles, add colors, write notes.
- Click ↑ Sync to push their changes back to the shared workspace.
Everyone working on the workspace sees the same published state. If two people edit at the same time, the last person to sync wins — coordinate with your group to avoid overwriting each other's work.