Planning the year the Jewish way can feel intimidating – especially if you’re new to Jewish life, still learning the calendar, or trying to build something meaningful without burning out. The holidays blur together, the expectations feel unclear, and it can seem like everyone else already knows what they’re doing.
The truth is, you don’t need to know every holiday, fast day, or custom to plan a meaningful Jewish year. What you need first is direction – a sense of where you’re headed, what matters in this season of your life, and how Jewish time can support you rather than pressure you.
In this video, I walk you through how to plan your Jewish year in a way that actually fits your real life. We’ll zoom out to look at the shape of the year, talk about planning around Shabbat and Jewish seasons, and set up gentle structure that leaves room for flexibility, growth, and return. Whether you’re watching this in January, at Rosh Hashanah, or somewhere in between, this approach is designed to meet you where you are and help you begin again – thoughtfully and without overwhelm.
Download the companion planning guide to follow along at your own pace or to plan on your own.
If you don’t want to build Jewish life alone, Bayit Builders is open January 11–15. Learn more here.
It’s a supportive membership for converts and seekers who want structure, clarity, and community while building Jewish life in real life.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
If you’re new to Jewish life and the calendar feels overwhelming, you are not alone.
You don’t need to know every holiday in order to plan meaningfully.
This is how to plan your Jewish year so that it actually fits your real life.
So we’re gonna plan the next year for you.
Whether it’s December or January, or you’re doing this at Rosh Hashanah time, whenever in the year you find this video is a good time to plan the next year.
Hi, I’m Kochava. I’m a Jewish convert and I have been helping people convert to Judaism since 2010 through my blog, Building a Jewish Life.com.
If that sounds useful to you, be sure to hit subscribe.
And if you don’t wanna take notes while we’re talking, if you go down into the description below, you’ll find a link to a template for this.
I don’t want you to get overwhelmed. Nothing here is set in stone.
Essentially, most of what we’re gonna be doing today is writing out a lot of reminders. They don’t mean you have to do anything. I want you to be flexible with this system.
It’s here to make your life easier. Not harder.
Let’s start with where you’re planning. Digital or paper, either is fine. However, I do really hope that you have a digital calendar component for the things that are time-based. Because there’s a great tool you can use that will make your life so much easier and it’s free.
And of course, if you have a partner or a roommate or another person you share a lot of your life with, it’s great to have a digital calendar because you can make a shared calendar between the two calendars for the things that affect you both. Since we’re talking about Jewish holidays and things like that, in most cases, they’re gonna affect your whole household.
If you’re a paper person, the two methods I’ve had the most success with are the bullet journal and making my own planner. I love the bullet journal. Uh, I use a very, very simplistic form of the bullet journal.
But in the end, I found I was repeating the same categories again and again. So I made my own planner. I just made it in Word and print it out every two to three weeks.
So for instance, I just have a weekly spread where I I just have one page per day.
And I like printing it out every two to three weeks because I can change things. Like how it’s set up. Right now, actually, I really wanna change it the next time I do it. Take out something that I just haven’t been using, most of what I need is just space so that I can think out loud.
And before you ask, this is just an Arc journal from Staples. And this is actually the inside of it. I didn’t like the plainness of the outside, and so I just flipped them around and it has these little discs and I’m able to put in and remove pages really easily.
The one big downside to it is it requires a special hole puncher, and I invested in a really nice one from Levenger for the Disc Bound series.
I’ll put links to all those down in the description below.
So that tool that will make your life so much easier is HebCal, H-E-B-C-A-L.
Let me double check what its ending is. HebCal.com. So I’ll throw some screenshots up, but what I want you to do is when you go to their main page, you can see on the right hand side there’s a thing that says a a year and the calendar. So when I’m making this video, it is about to be 2026.
So it says 2026 calendar. So you open it up and it shows up to a monthly view. What I want you to do is underneath Jewish calendar, there is a button for settings, and it’s got a lot of settings.
The biggest question is, are you living in Israel or outside of Israel? Because if you aren’t aware, the dates for Jewish holidays can be a little different whether you are in the land of Israel or outside the land of Israel.
So most of you are going to choose diaspora, and if you don’t know that word, it just means like the worldwide population of a group.
The one setting I would recommend you turn on that is not a default, is at the very bottom on as it is right now. It says weekly Torah portion on Saturdays. It’s gonna give you the Torah portion for the week, and that’s just really useful to have.
A few more options you might be interested in: the days of the Omer for during the summertime, counting from one to 50 to help you remember to count the Omer each day. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it. You don’t need to do it yet.
You also might consider doing “show Hebrew date for every day of the year,” if that’s something that’s important to you.
Less likely for you, but just in case there is daily learning. And if you go down, it has a huge choice of daily learning programs. These are programs that throughout the world, Jews are doing on a certain schedule. So the most common is the Daf Yomi, which is a page of the Talmud, the Gemara.
But if you were here on this video, you probably don’t need this section yet.
One that you probably do wanna have if you are observing Shabbat already is candle lighting and fast times. You can put in your zip code and it’ll give you times that are specific to where you live so that you’ll light Shabbat and holiday candles on time. It’ll also give you the times for fast days.
Other than putting in a zip code, I wouldn’t touch anything in this section unless you live in an extremely high elevation area and I don’t know how to use that setting. So hopefully if you live in a very high elevation setting, you know how that works.
And the last setting you might be interested in is, uh, event titles. It’s a little box at the top. And for me when I clicked it, it said Sephardic translations. That means that it’s writing in English letters the Hebrew terms with a pronunciation that is common in modern day Israel.
You can also choose Ashkenazic transliterations, which is writing it in English letters in the Ashkenazi pronunciation. You can also choose from a long list of other languages. And you can even do it in Hebrew, both with vowels and without. And you can even do transliteration and Hebrew at the same time. So once you’ve got all those settings set up, click “create calendar.”
Then you’ll click the button at the top that says, “Download.” Then you’ll select your calendar app. So for me, I would choose Google Calendar, and then it gives you instructions on how to subscribe to this calendar that you just made.
And the calendar that you’ve made is good for the current year and the next four years. So about every four to five years, you’ll wanna come back to HebCal and recreate a calendar for yourself. I’ve been using this for many years. It’s so useful. Cannot recommend it enough. I’m not being paid anything by anyone.
Honestly, I don’t know how they make their money, but they are a huge resource for the community and I’m very thankful for them.
So now that you know how you’re gonna be planning, where you’re gonna be planning, let’s take a stop for a second and ask what you’re planning. What are your goals? Why are you here wanting to plan your year in a Jewish way?
Hopefully, you’re wanting to orient yourself more to Jewish time and the Jewish seasonal calendar.
But fundamentally, who are you becoming this year? What are these planning tools intended to do in your life?
There are two quick ways that you can find some answers to this question. The first is choosing a Word of the Year. I’ll link up above and down in the description below to my short video about choosing a Word of the Year in a Jewish way.
It’s kind of a way to think of what is the big theme of your year.
For me, it’s community. I am getting more involved in my community this year.
For you, maybe it’s Kavanah, which means intention. Maybe you’re being more mindful this year. Maybe your word is Simcha, joy. Maybe you wanna bring more joy into your life. The options are endless, and that video that I link to will give you a lot of Jewish suggestions.
You can also look up regular Word of the Year resources.
The second way is thinking about “Future You.” Who are you a year from now?
What do you do? What do you listen to? Where do you go?
How are you spending your time?
If you’re fancy, you can make a vision board. There is even a subset of vision boards called a “Becoming Board” that you can do to take pictures of what you hope you are becoming. I can have pictures kind of in the process of what you’re doing. Or in this case, it is hard to find good pictures of Jewish stuff and Jewish people, so you could go on Canva and get pictures of items that we use in certain mitzvot.
Maybe that’s a Siddur. Maybe that’s a Mezuzah.
There’s a lot of options. You can take pictures from different holidays, put them on there.
So you can get as arts and craftsy as you would like.
Personally, I like to make a vision board that I put as the lock screen on my phone. If I weren’t recording this video with my phone, I would be able to show it to you, but also it’s kind of a little personal to share. Thankfully, very few people see my lock screen.
But it keeps those ideas percolating in my subconscious throughout the day.
Now let’s get into the calendar. Fundamentally, I want you to frame your week around Shabbat. You’re gonna frame your week around rest. Shabbat is the infrastructure of your week. It’s where you come back to every week reconnecting again and again. No matter how well or how poorly you did Shabbat the week before, next shabbat is always a new opportunity to try again. And the more you try, the better you’ll get.
Even if growth is a little wobbly sometimes.
So what that looks like for me is I do my weekly planning on Sundays early in the day, and I start my week on Sunday ending in Shabbat.
So let’s start with the Jewish calendar, shall we? First, I really recommend getting a high level view, the 30,000 feet in the air view, if you like. This isn’t filled in yet for 2016, but all it is is all 12 months on one sheet of paper.
So, for instance, I can find September and put Rosh Hashanah in there. I’m pretty sure it’s in September of 2026 this year. But going through and doing that for the full year, just so that you have an idea of where your time is spread out and what months are busier than other months.
But there is gonna be something almost every month.
HebCal is another great place where you can find that. If you go to their webpage, they just have a… let’s see.
Up at the top of the HebCal page, if you just click “Holidays,” you’ll find all of these holidays that we’re talking about in here today.
So on that list, what you’re gonna be looking for are obviously the major holidays.
On the minor holiday list, most of these you can ignore. The ones that are most commonly observed, at least in the Jewish communities that I have been in, Tu B’Shvat, gets at least a cursory mention. So does Tu B’Av. The days of the Omer, if you’re counting the Omer. And then Lag B’Omer is often a really nice day for community events, so you might want to have it on your calendar so that you can find if there’s gonna be a community bonfire, for instance.
And then you might want Leil Slichot. That’s the beginning of prayers before Rosh Hashanah.
You will wanna mark all of the minor fasts. These are daytime fasts from morning to night.
The two major fasts, Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av are gonna be listed in the major holidays section. And those are 25 hour fasts.
On the modern holidays list, pretty much all that the average person is gonna need is Yom HaShoah, the commemoration of the Holocaust. And then commonly celebrated will also be Yom HaZikaron and Yom HaAtzmaut, which are two Israeli national holidays. Yom HaZikaron is basically Memorial Day for fallen soldiers.
Yom HaAtzmaut is Israeli Independence Day, and they are one after the other.
As a footnote, a holiday that maybe you wanna include is Sigd, which has been increasing in observance every year it feels like. So I feel like we’re on the beginning of a resurgence of this in the wider Jewish community. It is traditionally an Ethiopian Jewish tradition.
You can use the special Shabbatot if you would like. Those are times when, uh, generally it’s more important to go to synagogue than maybe other weeks. And then at the bottom you’re gonna have Rosh Chodesh, which is the new month.
From my perspective, I think you should be looking at Rosh Chodesh and celebrating it. You don’t have to do much for it. It doesn’t really have any set traditions, but I think it’s a great time to check in with yourself and your Jewish goals and reconnect with the Jewish calendar and Jewish time.
In my membership Bayit Builders every month at Rosh Chodesh, I release a monthly planning guide where we basically have a workshop with a video and a worksheet where we work through trying to formulate our goals for the next month. And that’s just in general a really great practice to have around Rosh Chodesh.
And if you’re a female, Rosh Chodesh is often seen as a women’s holiday and women might have special things that day. Like some people don’t do laundry that day, or certain other household tasks that we know disproportionately fall to women.
So whether you’re using that year at a glance view or not, you’re gonna wanna put those dates on your calendar.
And next I want you to put in reminders for all of those dates that you intend to celebrate as of right now. You can always change your mind later. So for instance, you could do it for just the major holidays or just, you know, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Passover.
I know within Google Calendar you can set reminders where it’ll send you a push notification or an email up to four weeks in advance, and you can set multiple of them. So for instance, I might set a reminder email for four weeks out, two weeks out, one week out, but I have ADHD, and I have a tendency to forget things and have time blindness.
You may not need as many reminders as I do.
And one of the things that I like to do within my like event for something for say Passover, Pesach, I’ll actually put a to-do list in the description section of that event. That’s a good thing for you to do right now while you’re thinking about it.
Just throw in whatever you’re thinking of and it’ll be there waiting for you when you get that first reminder to like, check in on this event.
For most of them, you could do a lot of copy and pasting between the different holidays, which is why I like to do it all at one time, because then you’re able to copy and paste from Pesach to Rosh Hashanah, to Yom Kippur, to Hanukkah, all in a row.
That’s the most basic level of planning your Jewish year but I want this to be useful for your whole year, your whole life. So what else are we gonna be plugging into this calendar? The normal stuff: birthdays, anniversaries, school calendars, work calendars, sports calendars. Q1, Q2 if you’re using quarters like at work.
Reminders to care for your body and your home. For instance, a practice that I learned a long time ago was on the first day of my birth month every year, I have an event for me to call all of my doctors and set up my yearly appointments. Yearly physicals, annual vet checkup. and checking in with my dentist to make sure that my next six month checkup is set up.
You can also add in things like regular car maintenance, cleaning your gutters. The most important thing of all of these entries is to make them repeat yearly so that you only have to do this once and then never set it up again.
With the dentist one, you could set one every six months so that you have a reminder to call the dentist and make sure you have an appointment.
So you’ll also wanna add national holidays and also community events, both within the Jewish community and in your broader community.
Like for instance, a farm near me has started a relatively new tradition where they have fall celebrations every weekend the month before Halloween.
So I put a reminder in my calendar at the 1st of October to look up what the dates are and choose which Sunday I’d like to attend.
You could do the same, for instance in an American context, you know that your community has a big parade you’d like to go to for the 4th of July. These are things that you can predict at least approximately when they will be, and you can set yourself a reminder to double check what the community events are for that.
Another example would be January 1st in the United States is an annual hiking holiday in the National Park system. I have a reminder a few weeks before to look up what hikes are being offered at different parks around me to try to choose one.
And then two more Jewish specific ones. The next, um, Yartzheits, which are death anniversaries for close family or friends. So in Judaism, we tend to commemorate the anniversary of someone’s death rather than the anniversary of someone’s birth. The tricky thing about Yartzheits is they’re on the Hebrew calendar, and the Hebrew calendar changes on the Gregorian calendar every year.
So how do you manage that?
How I do it and has worked well for me is at the beginning of the year when I tend to do annual planning, I have an event that is just “Yartzheit Dates,” and in the description I can put in who it is and the date on the Hebrew calendar, and then I can use a tool like HebCal to figure out where that is on the Gregorian calendar this year and program it into my calendar.
These ones, obviously I don’t set to repeat yearly, but the Yartzheit date file itself I set to repeat yearly. It is manual and it is annoying, but it’s a lot faster than all the other methods I’ve found. And if you are new to this video, you probably don’t have a lot of Yartzheits to track, so it shouldn’t be that big of a hassle for you.
You could also do the same with Hebrew birthdays.
And then the last thing, a super practical note. Put in event reminders to ask for time off for Jewish holidays that you are taking off. I’ll link up there and down below to my video about how to ask for time off from work for Jewish holidays, but you wanna make sure that you’re getting them in far earlier than you need to, to try to get the best chance of being able to take them off.
In most cases, in most countries, because it is religious holiday, you are able to get them off without a problem because it’s a issue of workers’ rights rather than say a vacation request.
But of course, in most cases, you are still using vacation days, which sucks.
I know lots of Orthodox Jews who use up every single one of their vacation days for Jewish holidays, and that sounds really fun to people outside of that. But Jewish holidays aren’t a vacation by any stretch of the imagination.
And then a few more Jewish related tasks.
You can also schedule in your weekly Jewish commitments: synagogue attendance, Parsha class, a Shiur on a certain topic that happens every week, a monthly meeting with your rabbi.
When you anticipate going to the Mikvah if you use a Mikva.
Times when you would like to be making Tzedakah, um, donations of your time or money.
And any community event you would have in your local synagogue community if you have one.
If you don’t have a local Jewish community, I’ll link up here and down below to a video that gives you ideas for what you can do when you don’t have a community. All is not lost. You can still begin living Jewishly right where you are.
And along those lines, if you are tired of figuring out Jewish life all on your own, my membership Bayit Builders is about to open to new members January 11th through 15th, 2026.
The doors are only open three times a year, so definitely get in while you can. There’s a link down in the description below for more information.
Bayit Builders exists explicitly so that you don’t have to do all of this stuff by yourself.
You can do it with people who “get it” and are dealing with the same types of problems and issues as you are.
If this video was helpful, I hope you’ll click like down below so that these videos can reach more people they would be useful to.
And remember, if you want a template that goes over everything we’ve gone over, you can click down below in the description.
