No synagogue nearby? Celebrating Rosh Hashanah solo? You’re still invited to a sweet, meaningful New Year.
This post – and the video – is your calm guide to Rosh Hashanah at home: set one honest intention, light holiday candles, say Kiddush, and dip apples in honey. We’ll touch Cheshbon HaNefesh (gentle soul-accounting), simple symbolic foods, and what to do if you don’t have a machzor (specialized prayerbook).
Real-life friendly: low-energy options, store-bought shortcuts, shofar alternatives if loud sounds are tough, and easy ways to loop in kids or roommates without making it awkward.
Want everything in one place – blessings, checklists, scripts, links? Grab the free High Holidays at Home Resource Guide and follow along. Begin where you are. 🍎🍯
Transcript below.
Transcript:
No synagogue nearby? Celebrating Rosh Hashanah solo?
You are absolutely not the only one, and there is no reason for you to miss out entirely.
Maybe you’re new to Judaism.
Maybe community feels out of reach right now.
Or maybe you just don’t have the big family table people imagine for the High Holidays.
Hi, I’m Kochava. I’m a Jewish convert and I’ve been helping people convert to Judaism since 2010 through my blog, Building a Jewish Life.com.
I’ve been there. For many High Holidays during my admittedly long conversion process, it was just me, a prayer book, and a lot of feelings.
What I learned is that those days can still be powerful even when you’re on your own.
This is part one of the High Holidays at Home series. Today we’re covering Rosh Hashanah. The next video will cover Yom Kippur at home.
So make sure to subscribe so you’re notified when that video drops. And after it drops, you’ll find the link to it down below in the description.
So I’m gonna walk you through some rituals you can do at home this year.
Meaningful ways to connect spiritually and the practices that changed how I approach this season.
Before we get into the specific rituals, let’s talk about preparing yourself for this season.
First, I want you to set an intention. What’s your goal here?
Take a moment before Rosh Hashanah to ask yourself, ” what do I want this new year to hold?”
Doesn’t have to be big or lofty. Just something that feels real and meaningful to you.
Second, gather your supplies.
If you wanna join me in some of these rituals, you’ll need things like apples and honey. Candles. Maybe a journal or a notes app, a shofar or a recording of a shofar, a new fruit you haven’t had for a while.
And copies of the blessings and prayers you wanna use.
Ideally, you would have a Machzor, which is a prayer book that is specific to a certain holiday. In this case, Rosh Hashanah.
That’s best, but you can use a regular prayer book, the Siddur. It just might require a little more flipping around.
You can also find free copies of a machzor, a little hard to navigate but usable, on the website Safaria, S-E-F-A-R-I A.org.
If this list feels overwhelming, there is a companion freebie to this video: the High Holidays at Home Resource Guide. You’ll find a link down in the description below so that you don’t have to take such careful notes during this video if you don’t want to.
That Guide will help supplement this video with trusted resources. And finally, I want you to honor the season that you’re in. Your holidays this year may not look the way you want them to.
That doesn’t make them less real or less valuable.
Each Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is a new doorway, another chance to grow deeper in your Jewish practice. Everyone starts somewhere and no one ever starts where they plan to end up.
So go easy on the guilt. It is what it is, and next holiday, next year they can be different. This is just where you are today.
Wherever you are right now, that’s where you begin.
So Rosh Hashanah.
It’s the Jewish New Year, traditionally a time of sweetness and renewal and hope. Over two days traditionally, we mark the beginning of the year with festive meals, prayer, symbolic foods, community time, and the sounding of the shofar.
The holiday is both joyful and reflective, celebrating the gift of life while also being a period of Teshuva. Traditionally translated as repentance, but also turning or returning.
It’s about realigning yourself with what matters most, not getting down on yourself with guilt and shame.
The rituals you’ll find here are ways to bring that sense of new beginnings and blessings right into your home, wherever you find yourself.
The first, and arguably one of the most basic practices of Rosh Hashanah is Cheshbon HaNefesh, a searching or accounting of the soul.
It is a time to look back on the year, notice where you grew, where you stumbled, and what you wanna shift moving forward.
You might write in a journal, sit quietly in thought or meditation, or pray in your own words.
It’s about honesty with yourself, not perfection.
This is between you and Hashem, nobody else.
If you find that there are things you wish you had handled differently and you would like to make amends, I made a video about the Jewish way to apologize, and it’s a very simple, psychologically sound way to repair relationships.
I hope you’ll check it out because all of us have relationships that could use some repair.
And we’ll get into it more at Yom Kippur, but Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, and people think of it as like “when G-d forgives you,” but G-d doesn’t get involved with the harms you cause to other people until you’ve repaired that with the other person. You can’t just “pray it away” like some other religions we may have heard of.
So this act of repairing the relationships is a big part of Cheshbon HaNefesh and bringing in the new holiday season.
I also made a video that I’ll link above and down below in the description for how you greet people during these holidays.
And it includes backups for if your mind goes blank and you forget what the holiday greetings are.
Traditionally, the first practice of Rosh Hashanah is lighting the Yom Tov candles. Yom Tov meaning holiday. Just like Shabbat, we light two candles to bring in the holiday.
The procedure of lighting holiday candles versus Shabbat candles is a little different.
With Shabbat, you light the candles and then say the blessing. On Yom Tov, you say the blessing, and then light the candles and you don’t cover your eyes. But that’ll all be down on the resource guide that’s linked below. You’ll find detailed instructions on how to light candles for Rosh Hashanah.
And the next you would find Kiddush, the blessing over wine or grape juice at the meal, and Motzi, the blessing for the challah, the bread of the meal.
Even if you’re dining by yourself, these blessings mark the moment as holy and help welcome in the new year.
Now the practice that a lot of people associate with Rosh Hashanah, and if you ask my children, apparently that is the only thing that they remember about Rosh Hashanah as I discovered this week, 📍 is that we eat apples and honey.
We dip the apples in the honey and that Resource Guide down below will include the link to the very popular children’s song, Dip The Apple in the Honey for a Happy, sweet New Year. I have never claimed to be a singer and I never will. My singing is about as good as my Hebrew, so look forward to that later in this video.
We do this practice to wish for us to have a sweet new year.
And of course, being Jews, we add blessings to this process. We make the blessing for eating the apple. 📍 We make the blessing Shehechiyanu, which is the blessing for new mitzvot that we’re doing, usually something we just haven’t done in a long time.
In English, the text of the Shehechiyanu Blessing, which to be fair, I’m pronouncing really well compared to normal. I don’t know what’s up today. Maybe today will be a good Hebrew video.
So the translation of that is ” blessed are You, Eternal our G-d, Sovereign of the universe, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season.” It’s basically a blessing on the blessings of our lives. I think it’s a really powerful bracha and I have a whole video that
introduces you to it in a really short and easy way, and it includes the full pronunciation of it for you if you would like.
A lot of people add a simple wish like may it be your will, our G-d to renew us for a good and sweet new year.”
What sweetness do you hope to bring into your life this coming year? Tell me down in the comments below. I’m very curious what you have to say.
On the second night, for the Shehechiyanu blessing, we also eat a “new” fruit. People get into debates on how new it has to be. Is it something you haven’t eaten in a year? Is it something that you just haven’t had in a while? People come down differently on that question. If it feels new to you, go for it.
A lot of people try to eat fruits they’ve never had before. Star Fruit is a really popular place to start for a lot of people.
Besides apples and honey, there’s a lot of other symbolic foods people eat on Rosh Hashanah.
The most common is probably a round challah, a round loaf of bread . Challah is any whole bread. It can be as small as a roll. It can be a big bread. As long as it’s not sliced, it can be challah. So don’t feel like you have to go out searching for a specific type of braided challah that you’ve seen on Instagram.
The roundness symbolizes the cycle of the year, new beginnings.
We also have pomegranates, which are full of seeds like the mitzvot that we hope to bring into our lives.
If those feel out of reach, that’s fine. This is a tradition, it’s not a rule.
But if you can add at least one symbolic food to your table or the apples and honey, it can help connect you to Jewish tradition in a tangible way.
Now let’s come to the central mitzvah of Rosh Hashanah: hearing the shofar.
In the video that I made about Elul, I mentioned that listening to a recording of the shofar is just fine and totally acceptable if that’s what you have access to. On Rosh Hashanah, tradition does say that you should hear the shofar in person. But again, if that is not a reality for you, recorded is better than nothing, especially as it gets you used to these traditions, and G-dwilling, hopefully next year you’ll be in a position to hear it live. Make do with what you got. We are a practical bunch here on this channel.
The shofar is supposed to be kind of like a spiritual alarm clock. It should wake you up to the year ahead, to the growth that you need to go through, to the presence of Hashem.
As you listen to the shofar, take a deep breath, pause, and notice what comes up for you. You may find that it stirs some pretty serious emotions in you, but on the flip side, you may find that it’s just loud and that’s okay. Not every moment is a spiritual moment of enlightenment. Sometimes you’re just not there for it. But still, we show up.
That is how you build a life. One choice, one action at a time.
Sometimes for you, rituals will fall flat, and that’s okay and that’s normal because we are human beings. And for my neurodivergent folks out there, I’m autistic and ADHD. The shofar really bothers me. It’s too loud. I’m very sound sensitive. So for me, I have yet to ever have the shofar be a high spiritual experience.
It just triggers my nervous system into fight or flight. That’s okay. That is the body and nervous system that Hashem gave me.
I’m moved in different ways. That is a beauty of Judaism: we have so many doorways, so many ways to enter tradition, and some ways will speak to you and some ways won’t.
If you get the chance to get a real kosher shofar, I recommend you do it. I recommend you learn how to play the shofar if you can. There are videos on YouTube to teach you how to play the shofar. You can blow it for yourself.
Try to make a special meal, even if it’s just you or with your family that has zero interest in Jewish stuff.
When the people in your household are not into this stuff, try your best to keep the things that are around them positive. And making a special meal is one of the easiest ways to do that. You don’t ask anything of them to participate or to do anything, but you make special food.
You make it look pretty. You do what you can to just elevate it a little bit. It doesn’t have to be a lot.
It can be as simple as something for challah, some soup, and maybe a special sweet dessert… all from the grocery store. You do not have to be baking and cooking in your kitchen in order to make a special meal. You can even use takeout.
I’m a big fan of one pot meals, and as long as it tastes really good, it feels special. There is no reason to kill yourself over a meal. People put way too much pressure on themselves because of social media about this. Make it easy.
You do not get bonus points for making it hard.
Kind of taking that a bit further, I want you to try to create a holiday atmosphere of some sort. You can do it with just one or two touches. Flowers on the table, a tablecloth
These small details help to embody the holiday and to tell your spirit at a deep level that something special is happening here.
And then the last ritual that I would encourage you to do is not an official one. This is just me being a psychology nerd. I’d kind of like you to essentially debrief your Rosh Hashanah experience. Reflect on what your experience was like, what worked, what didn’t work, what you liked, what you hated, what you wish you had done but didn’t.
Your answers don’t have to be perfect or complete.
Each year, you’ll come back to these practices with new insights as your practice grows and deepens.
Now let’s talk about community. That’s the big part that’s missing for most of you.
Even if you can’t be in a synagogue this year, that doesn’t mean you have to do this all completely alone.
And nothing says that the people that you spend this holiday with have to be Jewish, as long as they are not disrespecting your practice. It’s fine to involve your family, friends, roommates. Invite them to celebrate with you.
Non-Jewish friends and family join with religious Jews all the time in these celebrations.
You can take part in that practice of hospitality too. Hospitality is also a very important mitzvah.
Before Rosh Hashanah happens, connect with your Jewish friends. It’s even common to send New Year’s Greetings. And I understand this video is coming out pretty close to Rosh Hashanah. It is okay if your greetings are late.
In full fairness, I sent out my first cards ever this year and yeah, they’re gonna be late. I mailed them on Friday. It is what it is.
You don’t need a synagogue in order to create real connections with people.
Synagogues make that easier, but if you don’t have one, that doesn’t mean you’re shut out.
Even one shared ritual can remind you you’re part of a people, a history, and a future.
You’re part of a story that is bigger than you.
And this is not an Orthodox recommended suggestion, but I know that lots of people do watch live streamed or recorded services of the High Holidays.
If you’re gonna be doing that, it can help to actually participate in the services as you see them. To follow along in a prayer book, to stand when the congregation stands, sit when they sit.
Sing or hum along.
Now, here’s some real talk. I mean, we’ve done a lot of real talk already, but celebrating the High Holidays on your own can feel extremely lonely, and we need to be honest about that.
It’s okay to admit that you’re lonely or frustrated.
If you find yourself struggling, check in with yourself. What do you need right now? Do you need rest? Do you need connection, or is it just that you need to acknowledge to yourself that this is hard?
One practice that can help in those moments is turning to gratitude. Remembering that while our situation is not perfect, there are parts of it that are right and good, and we should be thankful for those pieces. Refocusing our attention on the good can help turn that feeling around, and always remembering that next year can be different.
You are not stuck here forever.
And don’t worry if these gratitudes are small. Could be the smell of the honey. Maybe you like the sound of the Shofar.
Knowing that you got a, a sweet message from a friend.
Or even as simple as you did it, you made it through the day and you brought some of these rituals into a place where maybe you thought you couldn’t.
These small moments anchor us.
They remind us that holiness is not only found in the synagogue and the crowd.
You can always find holiness in your own life too.
And remember, even if you are physically celebrating alone, you are celebrating alongside Jews all around the world, including a lot of people who are physically alone like you are. I can tell you in my work, there are lots of people who are trying to build Jewish lives with no Jewish community where they are.
But you are building that Jewish life with the generations of people who came before you. And the generations of Jews who will come after you, as well as everyone around the world.
These same prayers, these same foods, these same melodies, these same practices, they connect you across time and space, and you are never truly alone.
So I wanna hear below, if you’re in this situation, what are you thinking about doing this year? Or if it’s a little late, what would you like to try next year?
We’d love to cheer you on in the comments.
And again, down in the description below, you’ll find the link to that High Holiday Resource Guide that’s gonna give you links to useful resources to help you celebrate at home.
And if next week you’re headed into Yom Kippur alone, look for the part two of this series on Wednesday. It’ll be pre-scheduled to go out, G-dwilling, if I get this done in time.
Once it’s released, you’ll find the link below in the description as well. But fundamentally, wherever you are this year, it matters. You’re here for a reason. What is the lesson you’re meant to learn here? And how can you take that forward in the new year?
Shanah tovah, Chag Sameach, may you have a sweet and healthy and happy new year.
