Many people assume Shabbat only works if you have a large Jewish community, a table full of guests, and years of experience. But Jewish life has also been built around tiny kitchen tables, small apartments, difficult seasons, and people doing the best they can with what they have.
If you’ve ever felt too overwhelmed, too isolated, too inexperienced, or too “not Jewish enough” to start celebrating Shabbat, this guide is for you. Let’s talk about how to build a meaningful Shabbat practice that works in real life.
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Transcript below.
Transcript:
 If you’ve ever wanted to celebrate Shabbat but felt like you couldn’t because you don’t have a Jewish community, don’t know enough, or would just be sitting alone eating challah in your apartment, this video is for you. A lot of people assume Shabbat only works if you have a table full of guests and a thriving Jewish community around you, but Jewish life has also existed quietly around kitchen tables and tiny apartments and difficult seasons.
You do not need a perfect Jewish life before you’re allowed to start practicing one.
Hi, I’m Kochava. I’m a Jewish convert, and I’ve been helping people convert to Judaism since 2010 through my blog, buildingajewishlife.com.
If you’re trying to build a Jewish life step by step without drowning in conflicting advice or feeling like you have to do everything perfectly, make sure you’re on my mailing list.
I share practical guidance, encouragement, resources, and seasonal tools for building Jewish life in real life. You’ll get access to a library of free guides, including one specifically for starting Shabbat observance. The low-stress Shabbat “Menu” guide will help you start smaller and more sustainably, even if you feel overwhelmed, awkward, lonely, or if finances are tight.
And all of those can be problems with starting Shabbat observance. There’s so many details, and people online look like they’re doing it so beautifully. You can’t make it work. Maybe the other people in your home aren’t interested in Shabbat. Maybe you have a disability or chronic illness or you’re neurodiverse.
Maybe you don’t have a lot of spare money, and maybe you live far from a Jewish community, or you’re not involved in your local Jewish community. None of that means you can’t do Shabbat. Shabbat is for you, too. A lot of people out here are trying to quietly build Jewish life without the infrastructure that other people assume they have.
Fundamentally, Shabbat is about rest and connection: connection between you and Hashem, G-d, you and your family, you and the community, and you and the Jewish people as a whole. Even if the people you have access to are not Jewish, or even if you don’t have access to Jewish people in real life, you’re not failing Shabbat because your version is smaller than other people’s, and that’s the key.
You wanna start small. In that Shabbat menu freebie that I mentioned earlier, I focus on three anchors. These three anchors are three small changes you can start with in three different categories, and you just pick one thing per category.
There’s ritual, your meal, and your atmosphere.
So starting at ritual, maybe you light Shabbat candles.
All you need are some tea lights, somewhere safe to put them, and an internet connection to look up how to say the blessing for them. You could make Kiddush over grape juice or wine, or you could have challah and say the blessing over the challah, which is a type of bread.
But really any whole bread will do, even a bagel, even a sliced bagel.
If you can hold one half up in the air and the other half doesn’t fall off, it’s whole enough to be challah, which in practice means most of the bagels you can find in the grocery store today.
Some small changes for your meal, just make your meal a little nicer than normal. Maybe make your favorite dish.
Use the nice plates that you save for holidays. Get dessert or takeout. You could say some prayers, either ones from the siddur, the prayer book, or ones you come up with yourself.
And then the last category is the atmosphere, the things that just kind of signal that you’ve moved from ordinary time into sacred time.
Maybe that’s getting a bouquet of flowers for your table, even plastic ones. Changing into clothes that are a little nicer than you would normally wear. Inviting over a friend or family member, even if they’re not Jewish, still counts. You could sing some Jewish songs. If you have kids, you could give them a blessing.
There are lots of options here, but it’s easiest if you start with just three. As you get more comfortable with just these three things, you can add a few more pieces here and there.
Maybe you turn off your phone for an hour or two. You could go from doing this for one meal to two meals. You could add synagogue attendance if that’s available to you.
You could add a walk outside in nature, inviting your friend over for coffee on Shabbat afternoon, adding more prayers, unplugging for longer periods of time, doing less commercial or work activities. Napping is a classic Shabbat activity, and so is sex. All of these things are ways you can deepen your Shabbat practice over time.
It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s to still be meaningful and valuable to you. It’s normal to feel lonely or awkward or even silly when you’re doing these things by yourself. Shabbat can be beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time, and that’s okay.
Your practice will grow and change over time, and I think you’ll find that it gets better over time.
And you’re likely to start making connections with other people. Don’t try to do everything all at once or spend a ton of money on this. And definitely don’t compare yourself to what you see on Instagram. Burning yourself out trying to create the perfect Shabbat is a really ironic way of celebrating a holiday of rest.
Slow, consistent, and sustainable will win every time. Jewish life is built Friday after Friday after Friday after Friday, until suddenly it’s just something you do, not something you have to think about. And if one of the hardest parts of this is feeling isolated or disconnected from the Jewish community, I want you to watch this next video about what to do if you’re living without a Jewish community.
