When I finished converting to Judaism, everyone congratulated me — but no one warned me how disorienting it can feel afterward. You’ve spent months (or years) preparing, learning, proving, waiting for that magical moment at the mikvah… and then suddenly, it’s done. You’re Jewish.
But instead of feeling confident, you’re exhausted, unsure, and maybe a little (a lot) scared of “messing it up.” If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. So many new Jews feel this way — but no one really talks about it.
That’s why I created this video: 10 Mistakes New Jews Make (and What To Do Instead).
In part one, we’ll look at the internal struggles that show up after conversion — perfectionism, comparison, burnout, and the loneliness that sometimes sneaks in once the structure of conversion is gone.
Because here’s the truth: you don’t need to earn your belonging through exhaustion. You already belong.
Now it’s time to learn how to live Jewishly in a way that’s sustainable, meaningful, and yours.
👇 Watch (or read) Part 1 below, and don’t miss next week’s Part 2 — where we’ll dive into the outer challenges: boundaries, rabbis, and halacha. Sign up for the mailing list in the sidebar to the right so that you don’t miss it! You’ll also get more gentle guidance, practical tools, and real talk about building a Jewish life that actually fits you.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
When I finished converting to Judaism, everyone congratulated me, but no one warned me how confusing it can be afterward. You’re finally Jewish and you are now intensely terrified of screwing it up.
Don’t worry. You are not alone, and you’re not failing. You’re just new.
Welcome to part one of 10 Mistakes New Jews Make and what to do instead.
Make sure to subscribe so you can get the other half next week.
Finally, after years of work, I was Jewish, but I didn’t actually know what that meant in real life. I had spent so many years working towards this goal, I didn’t know what to do once I got there. I was the dog who caught the car.
Am I lighting candles perfectly? Should I join every class? Am I doing enough? These are the little traps that make belonging feel like a test instead of a relationship with the Jewish people.
Hi, I’m Kochava. As I mentioned, a Jewish convert, and I’ve been helping people convert to Judaism since 2010 through my blog, Building a Jewish Life.com.
Let’s start with the big one: the pressure to prove yourself.
If you’ve made it through a Jewish conversion, you probably have a perfectionist streak in you.
You might even be an overachiever.
So once you finish, you assume you have to be the best Jew because that’s the floor for performance, right? Everything below that is a failure.
So you’re overcommit to mitzvot that you’re not ready for, or to a degree you’re not ready for. You overcommit to learning.
You overcommit in community involvement until suddenly you are burnt out.
But I’m here to tell you: you don’t have to earn your belonging through exhaustion.
You can be a good Jew without being the best Jew. It’s good to aim for being the best Jew. I’m not saying it’s not, but I am saying that no one actually achieves “best Jew.” No one. We are all imperfect human beings.
So realize that the goal of being the best Jew is a little unrealistic. You can still aim for that, and I think you probably should. But be gentle with yourself when you inevitably fail. Something, something shoot for the moon and you’ll land in the stars, as they say.
So here’s what you should do instead: pick one mitzvah to be really good at.
One that you can be good at while doing it with joy, because ideally that’s part of the mitzvah too.
One mitzvah done really well with joy is gonna be worth 10 half-assed ones done outta guilt.
Mistake number two, the comparison trap. This flows pretty naturally from number one, right? You’re looking around at all the people around you and comparing yourself to them and finding yourself lacking. Everyone’s got it figured out but you. Everyone’s doing it right but you.
You are comparing your observance or knowledge to people who have been Jewish for a much longer time than you have, whether that’s born Jews or people who converted before you.
And you feel perpetually behind.
But this reminds me of what I see between my two kids actually. They’re seven and nine years old right now, and the 7-year-old is really upset that she’s always behind the 9-year-old, because guess what? The 9-year-old has two more years of life on her.
That is the nature of time. It is nothing to do with you being a failure. You will know less than people who’ve been around longer, and that’s fine. That is where you are expected to be.
What matters is the direction you’re going. Are you improving? Are you growing? That is what you need to be concerned about. Race against yourself, not the people around you.
Judaism isn’t a competition; it’s a conversation, a collaboration. Every person is important for fulfilling their own role, and you cannot fill the same role as someone else, and someone else can’t fill the role that you are destined to play.
So what should you do instead? Let those people around you be an inspiration rather than a threat.
Use them to help build goals for yourself, not using them as a measuring stick.
Especially because you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. You don’t know what the rest of their life looks like. You don’t know what their observances look like in private.
What you see is what that person wants you to see. No different than Instagram.
So look at them and take what works and leave the rest.
Mistake number three, expecting validation from the wrong people.
You would not be unusual if you found yourself chasing approval from family, rabbis, or the born Jews around you.
Spoiler alert. The only person you need validation from is Hashem. All these other people don’t matter. And if you finish the conversion process, a lot of them have lost their potential power over ruining your life so you actually can stop worrying about their approval quite so much.
Yes. That is a very real thing that we do not talk about enough in conversions: how you spend most of conversion seeking approval. Because that is the currency of conversion. They have to approve of what you’re doing in order to approve you to be converted. And we spend so much of our time wondering what this person thinks, and will this person misunderstand what I’m doing?
Will this person like what I’m doing? And we forget that that person is not the point.
Once you’ve finished your conversion, some of that pressure can be off. Of course, we all know that there is always the lingering threat that someone is gonna try to take away your conversion. That is a different problem. We can talk about that in a different video.
But finishing your conversion is when you finally get to have some of that freedom to just be a Jewish person. To just live your Jewish life like everyone else around you without being so much in a fishbowl all the time.
And let’s be honest, most of these people will never “get it.” They will never understand what you’ve been through. They will never understand your relationship to Judaism. But that’s true of all Jews to all other Jews.
No one knows truly what is inside another person.
People will misunderstand you. People will assume the worst of you. People will just not notice what you’re doing. If you spend your time worrying about what they think, you’re not gonna get very far in your own Jewish journey. You’re gonna be constantly chasing a mirage.
You can never fully get acceptance from another human being. It will always be conditional, and it’ll always be at risk of being taken away.
So be very careful that you don’t fall into that trap.
The takeaway is that peace comes from alignment with your values and your relationship with Hashem, not other people’s comfort and approval.
You don’t need to perform your belonging. The act of conversion means you now belong… whether they like it or not.
The last two mistakes that we’re gonna look at today are basically the loneliness spiral: when belonging feels far away and connection feels out of reach.
Mistake number four, ghosting.
There are a lot of reasons why someone might ghost after a conversion. If you’re not terminally online and have somehow missed the meaning of ghosting, it’s when you disappear on someone. Usually it’s used in the dating context, but it applies a lot in the conversion context because often, right after you convert, you can actually get hit by a lot of depression, a lot of overwhelm, and burning out. Like you’ve finally reached the goal and you can finally rest. And your body bubbles up all this stuff you’ve been suppressing for months or years.
You finally give yourself permission to relax and you fall apart.
And I can tell you I have been there. I was a ghost after my conservative conversion.
I converted twice. First conservative and then orthodox.
And at least in my case, it was because things felt really wrong on the day of my conservative conversion, like everything went wrong and so many things were bad.
And to me, it felt like it was a sign that I had chosen wrong and that I should have gone orthodox from the beginning.
And I was so hurt and mildly traumatized after what happened during my conservative conversion that I didn’t go back. I mean, my memory is a little spotty from that time because I was so upset and depressed and frustrated.
But I don’t think I really went back after that. And that’s so hard because I know that validates stereotypes that some people have about converts: that we’re just there to get the conversion and then we’re gone. We didn’t really mean it. We didn’t really want it. We just needed the paperwork, and that’s the exact opposite of what happened when I ghosted. And part of the problem was I had no models for what happens when things go wrong in a conversion. I didn’t know what to do. I assumed that at least most of it was my fault, but I knew some of it clearly wasn’t my fault.
And there were no support structures in place. No one I could turn to with these very complicated emotions and feelings that if I said them out loud, I would be proclaimed a, a bad Jew, and they would take my conversion back. Because I did at least have a conservative conversion at that point, and I didn’t wanna screw that up.
So here’s what I want you to remember: conversion is a beginning, not a graduation. It is the beginning of your Jewish life.
It’s okay to rest. It’s okay to recuperate, but try your best to not disappear.
And in many cases, that may mean seeking professional therapeutic help. If I had had the money, I would’ve sought therapy a lot sooner about this.
You will probably need more support in the first year or two after your conversion. Whether that’s from friends, mentors, or professionals. Seek it out because without it, you might fall apart and fall off the face of the earth.
And that’s not good for anyone, you or the Jewish people.
And that flows perfectly into mistake number five. Halfway through our list of mistakes new Jews make.
Neglecting your support systems and your secular friendships.
Quite frankly, it’s not a good idea to start over socially when you do a conversion. It’s not a good idea to cut loose all of your friends from before you started being interested in Judaism.
You probably shouldn’t cut off your family if you don’t have a preexisting reason for doing so.
You should continue to cultivate friendships with coworkers and classmates and neighbors. Everything in your life doesn’t have to be Jewish, and quite frankly, making those relationships is still Jewish.
So many people get caught up in black and white thinking that things are “Jewish” or they are “not Jewish,” and that there is nothing in between, and that’s just not true. That is not real life.
You don’t need to start over. A Jewish conversion should build upon who you already are. It should grow naturally from the person you are and the experiences you’ve had and the relationships you have.
Yes, you will probably lose some relationships because of judgment or confusion or them preemptively cutting you off, but that’s not the ideal.
You don’t have to burn bridges to build a Bayit, meaning like a Jewish home.
You are a better Jew when you are a healthy person, and that means fulfilling your social needs in a healthy way.
I mean, I am in no position to judge. I’m an autistic loner. I don’t have a lot of friendships.
Even someone like me who doesn’t need a lot of people can still feel that deep loneliness. I cannot even imagine how much worse it is for neurotypical people.
But what I do know is that loneliness can drive us into unhealthy relationships and unhealthy dependencies on unhealthy people.
It makes you ripe for abuse, for neglect, and for connection built on fear rather than trust and respect.
So here’s my advice: keep your life full. You don’t need to shrink yourself to fit someone else’s ideal of what a “good Jew” is.
Judaism does not call for you to cut off every one and everything that is not explicitly Jewish. You can still be yourself even after conversion. Your conversion should not erase who you are.
And as an extension of this principle, you should continue to have hobbies. If you liked knitting before conversion, you should be a knitting Jew. If you liked painting, you should be painting Hashem’s creation.
Jewish conversion makes you more fully who you are, and that should include all aspects of who you are and the relationships in your life.But fundamentally, belonging doesn’t come from doing everything “right.”
It comes from being part of the conversation that Jews have had between themselves and with Hashem since the beginning of the Jewish people.
So now make sure to subscribe so you can tune in next week for part two of the Mistakes New Jews Make and how to try to fix them.
Now let me know down in the comments, which of these mistakes has been the hardest for you to get over.
We’ve talked a lot today about the inner mistakes. Next week we’re gonna be talking about the outer mistakes: boundaries, rabbis, halacha.
And if this video resonated with you, you should probably join the mailing list at Building a Jewish Life.com. I’m here for real talk and real tools about real Judaism.
Living a Jewish life is imperfect and messy, so do it messy.
