Keeping kosher can feel overwhelming when you’re first starting out. One person tells you to buy new dishes. Another says you need separate sinks. Someone else hands you a list of foods to avoid. It’s no wonder so many people don’t know where to begin.
The good news is that building a kosher life doesn’t happen overnight. Like every other part of Jewish life, it’s built through small, intentional choices that add up over time.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through the first steps I recommend for beginners, common mistakes to avoid, and how to build a kosher practice that’s both sustainable and meaningful.
Want a practical guide to get started? Join my mailing list and download my free guide, Keeping Kosher for Beginners: Your First 10 Steps, with ten simple, manageable ways to begin building a kosher practice one step at a time.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
 If I were starting to keep kosher today, this is what I’d do first.
Everyone says, “Start keeping kosher,” but no one actually tells you how. So one of the most common questions that I get from people is, “I want to start keeping kosher, but I don’t know where to begin.”
Maybe you’ve been doing some research and you’re starting to panic because you’re reading about separate sinks, separate dishes, kosher certification, separating out meat and dairy, waiting between meat and dairy.
It’s overwhelming. So today, let’s talk about where you should actually start.
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.
And I made a companion guide for this video just for you. It’s called Keeping Kosher for Beginners: Your First 10 Steps, and it’s a free guide that walks you through 10 small, practical steps that I would recommend to start building a kosher practice you can actually live with, without feeling like you have to change your entire life overnight.
You can download it for free when you join my mailing list down at the link in the description below.
So here’s the biggest mistake beginners make. Keeping kosher isn’t an all-or-nothing decision. People act like there is some ideal called keeping kosher, that there is keeping kosher and then everything else.
But that’s not true. There are many ways to keep kosher, even within the Orthodox.
Finding the kosher practices that are right for you will take time. People act like it’s one big giant switch you just flip, but no one goes kosher overnight.
You don’t become someone who keeps kosher by making one big decision, yes or no. You make it with lots of decisions over time. You become someone who keeps kosher through hundreds of ordinary grocery store trips, meals, and other choices.
And that’s how Jewish life is built as a whole. One meal, one shopping trip, one habit at a time. Trying to rush it is just a recipe for burnout.
I see people tend to fall in two camps.
The first one is the all-or-nothing camp that we already mentioned a little bit above. “I can’t do it perfectly, so I might as well not do it at all. What’s the point? It’s all a waste.” But that’s not true. Every mitzvah matters, and lots of people become Jewish or observant as adults, and almost none of us went zero to 60.
I’ve seen a lot of people try zero to 60, and most of them left Judaism altogether because it felt impossible, because they made it impossible. They had an unreasonable standard.
And now the second group, they take action, but they live with so much anxiety that they’re doing something wrong or that they’re going to do something wrong. They worry that they will buy the wrong thing, misunderstand a rule, or just embarrass themselves.
If that’s you, I want you to know that that feeling is incredibly common, like super, super, super common. And I’ll also tell you that all of us made mistakes, and we all messed up, and most of us did embarrass ourselves, but we lived to tell the tale. It’ll be okay.
Mistakes are often your best learning experiences.
So let’s get into these first steps.
The first one is the one that most people jump over. I want you to know your why. Why are you trying to go kosher? Most people in this world don’t give two flips about keeping kosher Why you?
You’re gonna need that why on the days when it’s hard, when you don’t feel like doing these rules. And those days will come, and there will probably be a lot of them, especially in the beginning.
You’ll need that why when you’re dealing with peer pressure from friends or family who are like, “Ugh, just stop it with the kosher thing already.” Or, “Just one bite. It’s fine. I won’t tell anyone.” Without your why, you’ll crumble at the slightest pressure.
Now, here are four places that people commonly start.
I would say overwhelmingly the most common is, number one, learning without actually implementing anything yet. That may actually be where you are right now watching this video.
Sometimes knowledge makes the practical changes easier, but sometimes it’s an avoidance tactic. It’s okay to stay here for a while, but don’t let yourself get stuck there.
Two, and what I would say is the second most common, is to stop eating one category of things, usually pork or shellfish. If you’re a vegetarian, you might start eating only kosher-certified cheeses, but that’s a much bigger ask than stopping eating pork or shellfish.
And of course, one of the most basic pieces of information that you should learn about keeping kosher is which animals are kosher and not. Pork and shellfish is an oversimplification of all the species involved, so you can go a little bit broader or with a different category if that makes sense for you.
For most people, this is a very manageable first change, and most people are willing to accommodate no pork or no shellfish.
Family, your mileage may vary, uh, since I’ll go ahead and tell you that food equals love in most family relationships. So if you’re having fights about kosher food, it’s not really about the kosher food, it’s about your relationship.
Do you still love them? Are you rejecting them? You know, easy questions.
Option three, start buying kosher-certified products. Doesn’t have to be all of them, but when you’re faced with, say, 60 jars of marinara sauce at the grocery store, you can choose one that has a hechsher on it if you’re in America.
A hechsher is a small logo that you’ll see on, uh, products that tell you who the kosher-certifying agency or rabbi is. There are lots of different organizations doing it.
A really handy tool is the CRC Kosher app. CRC stands for the Chicago Rabbinical Council, and they have a kosher logo scanner so that you can take a picture of, uh, what you think is a kosher symbol, and it’ll match it against a database to tell you who is behind it.
You may disagree with the CRC on whether that is a reliable organization or not, but that is really high-level stuff.
If you’re brand new to kosher, if it’s got a hechsher on it, A+, go for it. I’m sure someone’s gonna be real mad about, about that in the comments. But honestly, make it easy. You can always fine-tune it later.
You build your habit one step at a time, making only one small change at a time. That is the most effective way to make lifelong habitual changes. For those of you in the United Kingdom, hechshers, those little logos, are less used. And the London Beth Din, a rabbinical court/organization, has an approved list of kosher foods, which they have thankfully made available now in an app called Is It Kosher UK.
If you’re in other countries, your mileage will vary. Tell me about your countries. I’d love to learn more about how each country handles it.
Honestly, most of what I’m doing here for you is crowdsourcing information. So any time you have tips or tricks that you find in the conversion process, send them my way, because then I can broadcast it to lots of people so that lots of people have that information.
That’s me, human Reddit.
The trick is people will tell the shortcuts and the dirty laundry to a human, but not always to Reddit.
And also, I’m able to take all of those different, what’s the word? S- those different pieces of information and find the patterns, because that’s what my autistic brain’s superpower is, pattern spotting.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
Number four, start by making one meal kosher. I’m gonna recommend you go with Friday night Shabbat dinner. Just one meal a week. Follow the kosher rules as best as you know how and with the resources you have right now. That’s a good foundation for making a consistent practice that then you can expand to other meals if you’d like.
For instance, some people will start with breakfasts are always kosher or lunches are always kosher, again, to the best of their ability. And as they learn more, they do more.
Now, here is what I would NOT do. I would not go out and buy any kitchen equipment. I would not throw away any kitchen equipment. I wouldn’t panic over every ingredient. And I definitely would not try to become perfect in a weekend.
I would not throw out food I have already bought. If you feel very strongly about doing that anyway, I suggest donating it to a food pantry instead of just throwing it out and wasting money and food.
Now, what if you’re sharing a kitchen with other people who are not interested in keeping kosher?
Honestly, that’s most of you in the beginning. You do the best you can.
That’s the theme of our channel here. You do the best you can with the resources you have, and knowing that those resources can change over time.
I do advise that you don’t force these changes on anyone else. People don’t like it. And if you make them do things that they don’t like, they’re gonna be entirely against this whole “Jewish thing” you’re doing.
You get more flies with honey than vinegar. Make kosher a pleasurable experience for the other people. Cook special meals that happen to be kosher. Make those meals nicer, fancier. Have dessert at those meals. But don’t force them to eat anything they don’t wanna eat.
Should you continue cooking non-kosher things for people who want it?
Only you can answer that question, but I am in the camp of probably yeah, at least for now. The process of observance is imperfect. People act like it is so easily accomplished, but there are so many complicating factors, and it’s okay to struggle with them.
Do the best you can with the resources you’ve got.
And as part of that, I want you to remember, why does kashrut exist? It’s not a test or about winning. It’s not about being more Jewish than somebody else.
It’s a spiritual practice that should shape your daily life, bring more holiness into it. Nowadays, when you are living outside of an insular Jewish community, it’s also an exercise in choosing to be a holy person yourself in the face of people who would rather that you didn’t.
If keeping kosher feels awful to you or is full of so much anxiety, something is wrong, and you should get help. It doesn’t have to be that way.
And if you decide to take my advice and do that Friday night Shabbat meal, watch this video next about how to plan your first Shabbat experience.
And don’t forget to join the mailing list down below for the companion guide to this video of 10 practical ways to start keeping kosher.
