If Jewish learning feels overwhelming, scattered, or like everything is urgent all at once, you’re not alone – and you’re not doing anything wrong.
Most people don’t struggle with Jewish study because they lack motivation or discipline. They struggle because no one ever explained how Jewish learning is structured, how different areas fit together, or how to choose what actually matters right now instead of trying to learn everything at once.
So people panic-study. They binge podcasts, hoard book lists, copy someone else’s routine, or push themselves too hard – and then burn out.
Judaism isn’t meant to be learned that way.
Jewish learning is a lifelong practice. It’s supposed to grow with you, change with your season of life, and support how you live – not turn into another source of pressure or self-judgment.
In this post, I’m sharing a simple, flexible framework for Jewish learning that helps you slow down, focus, and build something sustainable. It works whether you’re converting, returning, or simply trying to make Jewish life feel more grounded and doable – especially if you’re disabled, chronically ill, or neurodivergent.
You don’t need to learn everything. You need a structure you can return to, again and again throughout your life.
Let’s talk about what that looks like.
You can learn more about this framework in The Torah Tripod: A Map for Choosing What to Study – and What Can Wait in the shop!
(You can always find my most up-to-date recommendations – like books – in the Jewish Life Resource Guide.)
Transcript below.
Transcript:
If Jewish learning feels overwhelming, scattered, or like everything’s urgent all at once, this video is for you. Most people don’t struggle because they aren’t learning enough.
They struggle because no one ever explained to them how Jewish learning is structured or how to choose what matters right now instead of some time in the future.
In this video, I’m gonna show you a simple framework that you can use, no matter what kind of Jew you are.
And it meets you right where you are. Even if you have disabilities, chronic illness, neurodivergence, this is a flexible program that can work for anyone.
It’s not a checklist. It’s definitely not a race. And it doesn’t require you to do everything at once.
Think of this as a map or a menu that helps you focus, pace yourself, and build a Jewish life over time that’s sustainable. There are no awards for burning out the fastest.
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.
If you don’t wanna take notes during this video or you want more nitty gritty details, I’ve got a longer explanation with more notes, more topics. You can find it in my shop at Building a Jewish Life.com.
I’ll also put the link down below in the description.
So why do most Jewish study routines fail? Usually it’s too much content, too fast. You have turned on an information fire hose, trying to suck down as much information as you can, as fast as humanly possible.
Maybe you’ve confused intensity for seriousness.
Or maybe you’re feeling time pressured because you feel like you decided you wanted to convert and now you want this to happen as soon as possible.
Or maybe you’re copying someone else’s routine. What works for someone else may not work for you.
Maybe you’re using studying as a coping mechanism to reduce your anxiety around whatever is driving you into this knowledge in the first place.
And maybe if you’re converting, maybe you’re confusing readiness with knowledge accumulation. But Judaism is lived, not just learned.
But most of all, I don’t want you treating Jewish studying as a moral test. It’s a practice, something that you should expect to do every week the rest of your life. Something that you’re gonna struggle with sometimes, and it’s gonna be super easy other times. There will be times when you fail to study. Life will take over. That’s just reality.
Build good habits now, and your practice can sustain the test of time. And it’ll always be ready for you when you come back.
Fundamentally Jewish study is supposed to shape what you do, not just be something you know.
It should support your mitzvot, your judgment, your prayer life, and your community involvement.
Becoming a trivia master is nice, but it’s not why we’re here.
So here’s what I want you to focus on to make this sustainable for you, today, at this point in your practice. Things may be different next week or next month or next year. Work with the resources you’ve got right now. Not where you wish you were.
This is perhaps the most frustrating advice that I’m gonna give you today: your learning should be small. It should be in bite-sized nuggets.
Judaism is thousands of years old. You are never going to learn everything Jewish.
Get comfortable now with never being able to finish.
You will always have more to learn.
So learn what you do learn, well.
And I’ll give you a pro tip from when I was homeschooling my kids.
In the Charlotte Mason education philosophy, there is an idea called narration.
The idea is you read something, preferably aloud if you have more than one person. But in a short amount. And then you stop and you close the book and you tell back what you just read. Just put it into your own words, as much as you can remember. It is simple, but it is so deceptively hard.
But the more you practice it, the more you’ll find that your working memory and your long-term memory will expand to hold this information. You’ll remember more long-term, and that’s what we’re here for, right?
Next, I want you to be flexible in your education. Like I said, some weeks will be different. Go with the flow, make it work.
Some weeks will be easy and some weeks will be hard.
Have a structure that you can return to so that you always know what’s next. That’s what I’m gonna give you here in this video: a framework.
Next. It should be meaningful to you. You’re not gonna connect personally with every single topic you learn. Some topics will be boring, some topics you’ll decide you hate. That’s okay.
Jewish people are not called the People of the Book for nothing.
We interact with our books and that means you’re allowed to have negative feelings about them.
What matters is what you do with that information.
How does it affect your life?
How does it increase your understanding of the Jewish people and Jewish history as a whole?
(But if you’re really hating a book, put it down. You don’t have to finish everything.)
Your learning should feel connected to your life.
If it’s not, it’s time to sit down and think about that and troubleshoot some things.
This isn’t meant to be just information.
So let’s talk now about building routine.
Habit building and routine building information is everywhere at this time of year, but it all boils down to pretty much the same things that you already know.
Make the action small.
For the habit that you wanna build, I want you to pick a time and a place to do it. I want you to prepare the area. If you’re using books, put your books out there and keep it out there so you don’t have to go searching for them. So if you wanna notebook there, pens, keep it all in one spot.
You can even keep it inside a basket or something to carry with you.
Ideally anchor this habit so that it piggybacks on another habit. You always sit down and do your studying after you brush your teeth in the morning.
You always do your studying on Friday evenings at 8:30 PM.
If you haven’t read the book Atomic Habits yet, you should probably read that one. That’s a really good book for habit building.
James Clear has the idea of the most basic action for your habit and making that the habit you’re creating. So, for instance, the example that I always remembered from the book is flossing. He suggests making a habit of flossing one tooth, just one. If you feel like it, you can keep going, but if you’ve done one and you don’t feel like it, it’s fine to throw the floss away and go to bed.
It reduces the amount of momentum and motivation you need to have to make it work, to get over that initial bump of inertia.
So here it might be just putting your butt in the seat. It could be just opening a book and yes, I mean sit down and open a book, look at it, and then you can close it and walk away. And you’ve fulfilled that habit. Most days you’ll wanna continue, but when you don’t, you have an out. And don’t underestimate the power of the out.
You don’t have to break the chain. You can still form the habit even if you are feeling rebellious that day or you’re time pressured.
But if you’ve been around here on my channel, you know that the next thing that I’m gonna say is don’t be hard on yourself when you inevitably miss a day. This doesn’t have to be every day. It doesn’t even have to be every week. Do the best you can with the resources you have. That is the foundational principle of this channel.
Forward motion is what matters, not the speed you’re traveling at.
Shaming yourself about missing these times actually connects negative emotions to this habit that you’re trying to build. It makes it something that’s now scary and harmful. You wanna keep positive emotions tied to this. You wanna be excited to sit down.
As much as possible, try not to tie negative emotions to your studying.
Now what do you actually study? You may have figured out by now that I am a dork, and so I have decided to call this the Torah Tripod.
The legs of this tripod are text study, history, and daily living.
But what about Hebrew?
You don’t need to learn to speak or read Hebrew.
But unless you have a serious disability around this, it is expected that you’ll learn to decode Hebrew. That’s fancy linguist speak for being able to read the Alef Bet, which is the alphabet. You should be able to pronounce words written on a page. That’s it. You don’t have to understand what they say.
You should just be able to pronounce Hebrew. And that’s not actually a very hard goal. I’ll link up here. I made a video of my favorite resources for learning the Hebrew alphabet, and they only take about five to six weeks of study with pretty minimal input time.
I am not downplaying how hard this is. I struggle with Hebrew even now. I’ve been around a long time now, but I’m neurodivergent. I’m ADHD and even though I have studied seven languages, I really can only do it in one alphabet. Once you add another alphabet, things go off the rails in my little squirrely brain.
But I do the best I can and I’ve picked up a lot. But am I ever going to be particularly good at Hebrew and am I ever going to be very quick reading it aloud? No, probably not. And that’s okay. I’ve made my peace with the brain that Hashem gave me.
You don’t need to be fast either. If you’re converting, you’re almost certainly gonna have a requirement of being able to read Hebrew aloud, but it doesn’t have to be fast. You would be surprised how slow is considered acceptable and they expect that you will probably still make a mistake or two.
People really work themselves up being afraid of Hebrew, but it’s not the, it’s not a big scary beast. Yes, it’s kind of annoying, but it is a necessary, basic skill of an active Jewish life. I have seen so many people do it, and I know you can do it too.
And then after that, obviously learning modern or Biblical Hebrew is encouraged, but it’s not necessary.
So now we come to the Tripod. We’re gonna come to the first leg: text study. This doesn’t have to be in Hebrew. You can read texts in English, that’s fine. Ideally, you’ll eventually work up to being able to work with texts in their original Hebrew or Aramaic or other language.
But English is a just fine place to start.
In fact, there is a wonderful free nonprofit website called Sefaria, S-E-F-A-R-I a.com. Let me double check that. Nope. Dot org. I always get it wrong. Sefaria has amazing resources, and a lot of them are in English.
Yes, it is mostly public domain materials so that English language might be pretty old and stilted and there might be some thees and thous, but it’s always available to you. I have no connection to them. I just think they’re a great resource. I highly encourage you to donate to their work If you are financially able to. I’ll put a link down in the description below for that.
But it’s not very helpful to just tell you to learn some texts. What texts? There’s a lot of texts. Like we said, we’re the People of the Book.
You’re gonna start in one place: the Parsha.
This is a set weekly reading that is done in synagogues around the world every week. All of the Jews are reading the same thing at the same time, at the same point of every year. We repeat the cycle every year, starting in the fall.
So if you learn nothing else, what I would encourage you to learn is to read the Parsha. That’s it. Take you less than 10 minutes, sometimes even less than five.
And that way you’ll be working with the same ideas and stories that Jews are around the world at that exact same time.
Ideally, you would add one commentary to that. Whether that’s a Parsha book.
Parsha books are books where each chapter is dedicated to one of the 54 Parshiot, which is the plural of Parsha.
There’s podcasts. There’s Shiurim, which is just a fancy Hebrew word for a class on a Jewish topic. There are Shiurim websites. If you wanted to Google that, it’s spelled in English, S-H-I-U-R-I-M.
There are blog posts about the Parsha. Like at Aish.com or Chabad.org. Aish is A-I-S-H.com, and Chabad is C-H-A-B-A D.org.
I always upload my own transcripts in order to prevent the auto transcriptions being terrible, but better safe than sorry. I spell things out for you when it’s important, just in case.
And if you always wanna automatically know what the Parsha is this week, I’m gonna link to a video above and down below that was for Planning Your Year the Jewish Way. It has a step by step walkthrough of how to set up an automatic Jewish calendar that syncs with your digital calendar. And it’s free and it’s easy, and that way you’ll always know what the Parsha is this week.
Parsha is your foundation. It puts you in sync with all the other Jews worldwide.
Now the second leg of our Torah Tripod: history.
There are thousands of years of Jewish history.
Jewish history gives you context for everything that you’re learning because Judaism doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens within a people, a tribe. And the history and story of that tribe has completely shaped how Judaism has changed over the years and continues to change.
Understanding how and why certain things happened is really powerful to understand your own Jewish practice and where you fit into the Jewish people.
You don’t need to learn all of Jewish history at once. And quite frankly, I’m really disappointed that I don’t know a good overview of Jewish history.
The best book I have is out of print, and it’s from the 1940s, and it’s got some deficiencies.
Probably because Jewish history is so very big.
So it works best when you study it in pieces.
In that guide that I’m linking down below, I break all these topics into subtopics and beyond.
But here are some general suggestions to get you started: Biblical history. Talmudic history. The Middle Ages.
Modern American Jewish history. Modern Israeli history.
The history of Antisemitism. And I do have a book recommendation here, A Convenient Hatred: a History of Antisemitism. I’ll link it down below in the description as well.
And then I want you to consider where your personal history intersects with Jewish history. What is the Jewish history of the place where you live? What is the Jewish history of the place where your ancestors lived?
If you saw my shockingly popular video about Jewish geography, I’ll link it up there and down below. You’ll find it extremely helpful to know Jewish geography history.
And history is one of the best places to practice narration. You would be amazed how many details you will forget.
But here’s the key with Jewish history. I don’t want it to just be an academic exercise. This should also interact with your life.
As Jewish things happen in your life, like antisemitism or Israel in the news. Learn about those topics. Inform yourself.
But also follow your interests. Study parts of Jewish history that excite you, even if they’re not particularly useful.
Fundamentally, Jewish history is giving you an orientation. It helps you understand not just what Jews do, but why we are the way we are.
Now the last leg of the Torah Tripod is daily living. This is the broadest category. It encompasses almost everything. Prayer. Keeping kosher. Keeping Shabbat.
Business ethics.
Charitable donations. There is no shortage of Jewish topics that you could learn about.
It’s how Judaism shows up in your kitchen, your calendar, your relationships, your work, and your body.
For a lot of people, this is the most anxiety provoking type of learning because you are always wondering whether you measure up. And most of the times you’re gonna find you don’t measure up.
Because we hold up an ideal.
Just keep moving forward with Mitzvot. You’ll probably never reach the ideal level, but you can get close. Here’s what I fundamentally want you to understand about studying Jewish practice and Jewish law: the goal here is not perfection.
The goal is fluency in asking questions and making choices.
Traditions vary wildly from community to community, even within the Orthodox.
Learning about Jewish practices in different communities will help inform what your practice looks like.
Or what you don’t want it to look like.
There is a reason that one of the most common phrases you will hear out of a Jew’s mouth on the internet is “ask your local rabbi.” Because that’s what we do: we encounter problems, and we ask people for help. And that’s what I want you to learn how to do too. Your study of Jewish practice and Jewish law should teach you to ask good questions, help you spot questions in the first place. That you know there’s a question here is a huge victory, even if you’re not sure how to ask the question.
Any rabbi worth their salt loves good questions.
They love to see you interacting with the material and finding your questions, and maybe they can help you find a few answers.
But sometimes there is no answer, and that’s Jewish too.
Most of the time there is no one true answer.
But in this practice area, the biggest pitfall that I see is not being honest with yourself.
You don’t have to tell anyone else what you do or don’t do Jewishly. But you should understand for yourself why you do or don’t do things.
Know what you’d like to take on later. What maybe isn’t working for you.
Are there ways to adapt it so that it does work for you?
These are all questions that are great to work through with your rabbi. But you’re under no obligation to share it with your rabbi.
So that’s the Torah Tripod.
But here’s what’s next. I want you to prioritize things that make you happy, things you enjoy, things that light you up. Because that is when you’re going to find the most fulfillment. It’s going to help you stay sustainable.
Maintaining excitement and enjoyment over time is hard. You are basically marrying Judaism. And just like couples have difficulty getting that same excitement together the same thing is gonna happen with you and Judaism.
Following topics you love is how you combat that.
So remember again, you can find a more detailed explanation of all this down in my shop, in the description below.
And YouTube thinks that these are the videos that you would most like to see next. Why don’t you see if they’re right?
