The Sheva Brachot, the seven blessings, are the sequence of benedictions recited over a cup of wine as part of the Jewish wedding. They move outward from the couple to creation itself: praising God for the creation of the world and of humanity, for making humankind in the divine image, and then for the joy of the bride and groom, closing with a prayer that their gladness be like that of Eden and that the streets of Jerusalem again resound with the voices of the joyful. The blessings are drawn largely from the Talmud's tractate Ketubot, which sets out the marriage blessings, and they root the private happiness of two people in the widest possible frame of creation and national hope. They are recited again, over wine and after a festive meal, at each of the celebratory gatherings held on the seven days following the wedding, which take their name from them.
Talmudic law (tractate Ketubot 7b-8a) requires a minyan, a quorum of ten, for the blessings to be recited at the wedding itself, and specifies that at each of the celebratory meals held on the following six days the blessings may be repeated only if at least one panim chadashot, a new face who was not present at the wedding or a previous meal, joins the gathering, a rule that in practice shaped the sheva brachot week into an extended, rolling occasion for the wider community to share in the couple's joy rather than a private family affair. Non-Orthodox and egalitarian communities have in recent decades increasingly counted women within the minyan for this purpose and revised some of the blessings' language, departures traditionalist authorities do not accept.