No synagogue nearby this year? You can still create a deeply sacred Yom Kippur — safely, gently, and with intention — right where you are. This post launches Part 2 of my High Holidays at Home series, a step-by-step video to help you craft the day from home: set your kavanah, shape a simple service flow, and close the gates with clarity.
Inside the video you’ll find:
- Mindset + prep for a calm, grounded day
- Fasting with care (and thoughtful alternatives if needed)
- Creating sacred space at home
- Kol Nidre
- Vidui + Al Chet
- Ne’ilah – a gentle closing ritual you can actually do
- Break-fast + debrief – simple food ideas and a quick reflection practice
If you missed Part 1, watch Rosh Hashanah Without a Jewish Community for a sweet, steady start to the season. And grab the High Holidays at Home Resource Guide — a companion PDF with links, prompts, and a quick-start checklist so you don’t have to take notes.
Wherever you are this year, it counts. Begin here, and let next year go even deeper.
Need help with New Year Greetings? Know what to say and when to say it!
Transcript below.
Transcript:
If you’re celebrating Yom Kippur without a Jewish community, you can still create a deeply sacred day, safely, gently, and with intention.
This is part two of my High Holidays at Home Series.
Down in the description below, you’ll find a link to Rosh Hashanah Without a Jewish Community.
Also down in the description below, you’ll find a link to a free resource that is a supplement to this video and gives you trusted resources you can use to follow the advice in this video.
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.
So Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement is most famous for being a very long, very difficult fast.
A 25 hour fast from sunset the night before to nightfall of the day after.
The fast is intended to help us step back from the physical and focus on prayer, reflection, and Teshuva, traditionally translated as repentance. Literally meaning turning or returning.
We are returning to what matters.
There are other practices on Yom Kippur that are also about disconnecting from the physical. Yes. Not eating, not drinking, but also no sex.
And in many traditional communities, people will also wear a kittel, the garment that Jews are buried in. In a way, we are practicing our death on Yom Kippur. Yeah, pretty metal, right?
But also Judaism is clear.
Pikuach nefesh, preserving life and health, comes first. If fasting endangers your health, you shouldn’t fast.
You can still honor Yom Kippur without fasting if that is where you’re at right now.
And let’s be honest, most people do not go into their first or second Yom Kippur fully fasting. This type of dry fasting with neither food or nor drink is like a muscle. It takes practice. You probably will not get it right the first time, and that’s okay.
Every holiday, every year, you get the chance to deepen your Jewish practice. No one starts where they wanna finish. That’s okay. Try to cut off the shame and guilt that goes along with that for so many people.
You have been put in the situation you are in for a reason, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take actions to make the future different.
In short, work with what you got. We’re a practical bunch around this YouTube channel.
Most importantly, you should understand that fasting is not all or nothing. There are a lot of people who have partial fasts and there are many ways to do a partial fast.
Obviously, the goal is to do a total fast. And the rabbis are clear in traditional Judaism that the fast is the preeminent mitzvah of the day.
Traditionally, you should value the fast over going to synagogue, over praying. If you need to stay in bed all day long to make the fast happen, they would encourage you to do that.
But if the fast is dangerous for you, or if you have medications that need to be taken with a little bit of water every day, the majority of rabbis are gonna tell you to take your medicine.
If you have diabetes and it would be dangerous for you to fast, a lot of rabbis will tell you that there are other ways to handle this situation. I can’t speak to your specific case ‘ cause the options are truly limitless.
Let’s talk about some ways we can keep fasting safe and meaningful at home. Plan ahead. Hydrate really well in the days before.
Keep your schedule light. Reduce your caffeine intake. The headaches that most people get during fasting are actually usually caffeine withdrawal.
And yes, you will probably hear that there are people who take caffeine suppositories because a suppository is not prohibited as part of the fast. That’s hardcore. Um, I drink a lot of soda. That’s a step too far for me.
I think I’d rather have the headache.
But in all seriousness, reduce your caffeine a little bit at a time for a few days or the week before, and it’ll help a lot.
Number two, especially if this is your first time fasting, tell someone.
Make sure that a friend or family member knows you are fasting and will check in on you. God forbid, we don’t want something bad to happen and no one has any idea what you’re up to today.
Know the warning signs of severe dehydration: dizziness, faintness, confusion, or overwhelming sleepiness.
If any of these are showing up, you should break your fast. How you break the fast is a different question that ideally you would discuss with your rabbi, but I’m aware that most people that I’m talking to here don’t have a rabbi. There are different ways of breaking the fast. Usually people recommend doing small sips, small bites of food spaced out over time.
But is that enough for your situation? I can’t say that. Only you can be a judge of that if you’re alone in this situation.
In full disclosure, my health usually requires me to break my fast. I do the best I can. And obviously Yom Kippur is the time where I try the hardest and a time when I push myself harder than I would on other holidays.
There is no shame in having to break a fast. It is what it is. God values your health. ” You should live by the Torah, not die by the Torah,” as the Torah famously says.
So many people have guilt and shame tied up in their ability to fast. I have never been a particularly good faster to begin with, and now I’m disabled. I have not fully fasted successfully in a long time now.
You need to disconnect that from your sense of your self worth and your worth in God’s eyes.
If this is something you struggle with, there is a great organization that has support groups and resources on their website. It’s called a Mitzvah to Eat. I’m gonna put it down in the description below. They also have an active Facebook group. I have no connection to them other than enjoying their content.
I think their work is incredibly important for our community and a great support to a lot of people who need it.
So four, remember that partial fasts are options.
Some people abstain from solid foods but drink water. Some people shorten the fast by fasting as long as they are able to, and then breaking it when they have to. Some people fast only during daylight hours. Some people fast by eating simple, plain food.
There are a wide number of ways you can approach the fast if your health doesn’t support a full fast.
You can mark the day by eating simply, drinking only water, avoiding treats. If you’re not following traditional practices, you can fast from other things like limiting your screen time.
And most importantly, you can still celebrate the day by setting aside time for prayer, reflection, connection, and learning.
If you want more support around fasting and fast days, you can grab my guide called Fasting (or Not) With Intention. It walks you through planning a safe and meaningful day, whether you’re fasting or not, or somewhere in the middle.
The link will be down in the description, but you can also find it at Building a Jewish Life.com.
Now that we’ve gotten the big bulk of the day outta the way, which let’s note, fasting doesn’t require a synagogue at all. It is largely a home-based practice for every Jew.
But many Jews do enter the sacred space of a synagogue. If that’s not in the cards for you this year, you can create a sacred space in your home for today.
Shift your space a little so that your body knows that today is different.
You can set aside a particular space where you wanna do your prayer and reflection.
Ideally, you’ll have a Machzor, which is a specialized prayer book for Yom Kippur. If you don’t, a lot of the Yom Kippur liturgy can also be found in a regular complete weekdays and Shabbat Siddur, which is the prayer book, but you might have to jump around a bit.
Many people wear white on Yom Kippur, a symbol of renewal and purity. And again, also a reference to the way that Jews are buried after death in a plain white outfit.
Even a simple white shirt can help your body feel that change.
Yom Kippur begins with candle lighting, just like Shabbat and every other Yom Tov, holiday.
The candles are lit before sunset, and normally with Shabbat candles, you light the candles first, then you make the blessing while covering your eyes. On Yom Tov the process is kind of the opposite. You make the blessing and then you light the candles and you don’t cover your eyes.
Some people also light a 24 hour yartzheit candle, which is traditionally a specialized candle that we light, um, to honor the deaths of people, which a yartzheit is the anniversary of someone’s death.
Down in the description, you’ll find the link to that High Holidays at Home, uh, resource guide, and that’s gonna include instructions for how you can light candles for Yom Kippur.
Now the first service that opens Yom Kippur in a synagogue is called Kol Nidre. It’s the renunciation of vows.
The prayer itself, Kol Nidre has a haunting melody that many people feel deep in their bones.
If you get the chance to listen to a recording of that, I highly recommend it.
Close your eyes. Breathe.
You’re joining a chorus across the world and across time.
One of the other central prayers of Yom Kippur is called Vidui, I never get the pronunciation right. If you’ve been around here, you know that I stumble over Hebrew. It is what it is. It’s a confession. In synagogue, we say it together as a community.
If you have a Machzor or if you have the High Holiday Guide down below, I’ll have a link to a free copy of it that you can use. If you don’t have a copy of it, you can make your own version.
Think about where you missed the mark. The word “sin” in Hebrew is “cheit”, and it doesn’t actually mean sin. It’s an archery term that means missing the mark. It’s about mistakes, intentional and unintentional.
With yourself, with others, with God. Be honest but be gentle.
Judaism is not a religion of self-flagellation where you have to drown yourself in shame and guilt. Certainly there are groups that do that. But that is not required by Judaism. It’s natural to feel bad about what happens, but what’s important and what is valuable is how you move forward from it and how you make it up to the people you’ve hurt.
That’s what Judaism values.
This is not about shame. This is about clarity and returning to what matters.
The next famous prayer is called “Al Cheit”, so again, the sins, the mistakes. 📍 It is a long list of confessions of specific actions that we may have done wrong over the last year.
If you’re looking for something to learn, I would highly encourage learning more about the interpretations of the Al Chet prayer because it obviously includes us saying, “I have done X,” that you clearly haven’t done all of those things in the prayer, and there’s a lot of great writings about communal responsibility within this prayer.
Highly recommend.
And then as the day closes, we recite Ne’ila. It’s a symbolic closing of the gates. Because throughout this High Holidays we have said that on Rosh Hashanah, God opens the Book of Life and the Book of Death and starts writing people’s names in it. And we’re taught that you should never assume that you know which book you belong in. That most people are in the middle, and that we should be thinking about during this time how our actions can make the difference.
We say that those books aren’t sealed and inscribed until Yom Kippur specifically at the very end of the day when the gates are closed.
In the High Holidays at Home document, I have listed out some things you might include in a Ne’ila ritual for yourself.
But at the most basic, I want you to think about ” I did what I could this year. I can do better. May I be written for life, growth, and renewal.”
Even if your day didn’t look the way you imagined it, there is still value and meaning in what you’ve done. And I don’t want you to downplay that.
Be grateful for the little things that went right. Focus on gratitude rather than drowning in shame.
Again, every year is a chance to deepen your practice.
After the day is over, we traditionally have a break fast meal, and usually that’s a communal experience. People invite guests. You can invite guests. They don’t have to be Jewish. They don’t have to even give a fig what Yom Kippur is, as long as they’re respectful of your practice. It’s a good time to spend time with the people who matter to you.
But again, some fasting advice, keep the meal simple, and with some good carbs.
Personally, I just have some pasta prepared, uh, the day before and ready to go.
But whether that’s in person or virtually, I encourage you to share this moment with someone else, even if that’s on social media.
If you go back to part one in this series, there’s a little more about making a DIY virtual or real life community for these days. I really encourage you to check it out.
But we’ve covered the basics here, and I want you to remember that even one shared ritual reminds you that you’re part of a bigger story, a people.
Whether or not you’ve finished a conversion yet, if that is your situation.
And then after this is all over, I want you to debrief your experience. Psychologically this is a great practice and it’s gonna help your Jewish practice improve over time. Think about what went right, what went wrong, and why. How can you make this better next time? What do you wish you had done differently?
Again, you know me. I’m gonna say no shame, no blame, no guilt. That’s not the purpose of this debrief. This debrief is to help you deepen your practice and make the next holiday better.
And don’t forget to have gratitude for the things that went right. Or the nice surprises that happened along the way.
If you’re struggling with this day, I want you to take a step back. If it feels lonely or heavy, I want you to ask, “what do I need right now?”
Do I need rest? Connection? Am I feeling sick?
Or are you just feeling lonely or that this is hard? Those emotions are normal and natural and good. I want you to name those emotions so that you can actually work through them and find the goodness in them and find the way to make your practice better because of it.
And like I recommended in the Rosh Hashanah video, one of the best ways to deal with these feelings is through gratitude. Especially for the smallest things. Did you read something that really uplifted you? Did you feel a real moment of connection? Are you proud of yourself for fasting as long as you did?
Did you make things work even under really bad circumstances?
All of these are worth celebrating. Give yourself credit. Don’t downplay your successes just because things weren’t the way you would like them to be.
So now down in the comments below, I want you to tell me how you’re planning to celebrate Yom Kippur, or maybe how you hope to celebrate Yom Kippur next year.
We can crowdsource these ideas down in the comments below.
So again, you can download the High Holidays at Home Guide at the link down below for text and step-by-step instructions for these various rituals.
Wherever you are this year, it matters and it’s valuable. And your practice next year will be better because of it. Use the opportunities you have now. Where you are today. You don’t have to stay there forever.
Chag Sameach, and G’mar Chatima Tovah. May you be sealed for life, growth and peace.
