The Jewish High Holidays are a whole season, not a single event. Between Elul, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah, there’s a lot to learn, plan, buy, schedule, and somehow spiritually reflect on at the same time. No pressure! 😂
If this is your first High Holiday season, you do not need to do everything. In this video/post, I’ll walk you through how I would prepare as a beginner – starting with the practical logistics, choosing a few meaningful practices, preparing spiritually during Elul, and deliberately deciding what can wait until another year.
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Transcript below.
Transcript:
The Jewish High Holidays are coming.
So if you’re like most people around this channel, you’ve probably got 47 tabs open about what Rosh Hashanah is.
You might be wondering whether you should buy a machzor, a specialized prayer book for a holiday.
You haven’t figured out where you’re gonna go for services, if you’re gonna go to services at all.
But also somehow, you’re supposed to be deep in spiritual reflection at this time of year.
So let’s make this easier.
I’m gonna walk you through how I would prepare for the High Holidays as a beginner.
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 dot com.
And right now, my membership Bayit Builders is open to new members, which only happens three times a year. Because I’m just one person.
It’s a great tool for practical help for people who are building a Jewish life from scratch. And if you want to learn more about how we do that, click the link down in the description below.
So you don’t need to prepare for the High Holiday season all at once. First off, recognize that it’s a season. This is not a one-off thing. Like buckle up, you are in for a ride.
First there’s Elul, the month of preparation of spiritually before the High Holidays, then Rosh Hashanah, then Yom Kippur. And then many people don’t know this, but then there is also an eight-day holiday called Sukkot, which is followed immediately by Shemini Atzeret and Simchas Torah.
It’s a full month of holidays, y’all. It is nothing to sneeze at.
And if you need help asking your boss for time off work, I’m gonna link to that video up here and down below.
So what you need to do is figure out what matters most to you, what can wait, and what you’re actually choosing to do this year. You don’t have to do everything this year.
You’re going to be tempted to try to do everything. You wanna live in an idealized world where you are your best self doing everything perfectly. That’s not going to happen, especially if this is your first year celebrating the High Holidays.
Be practical about this. Do what works, leave the rest. Next year will take care of next year, and I guarantee next year will be very different from how you celebrate this year.
Every beginning is a holy place to start.
Now this is not sexy, but the place to begin is with logistics. Find out when the holidays are.
And remember that Jewish holidays start the evening before what’s written on the calendar. So for instance, this year is 2026 and this year, Rosh Hashanah is on September 12th on the calendar, but it actually starts the night before on September 11th. And you may not have realized that in most communities it’s a two-day holiday.
Make sure to write those dates down on your calendar so you don’t forget.
So are you going to attend services somewhere? Are you going to attend nighttime services? Are you gonna attend morning services? Are you gonna attend both days if they’re offering both days of services?
Are you gonna do synagogue on Yom Kippur? Are you going to fast on Yom Kippur?
Definitely don’t go into fasting without a plan. Jewish fasting is dry fasting where we don’t eat or drink. It can be very dangerous if you are not used to it and you don’t do it well. I’ll link up here and down below for a video about how to prepare for the fast on Yom Kippur.
Now the biggest logistical question is, do you need tickets to synagogue services? For many synagogues, people only come to synagogue once a year, and it is on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And so they are smart nonprofit institutions, and they use these as the biggest fundraisers of the year.
They sell tickets. Partially, that also makes sure that there’s room for everyone, because if everyone just shows up how they want, it may be more than the fire marshal would allow in the building. So tickets help make sure that only an appropriate number of people are in the building.
And in most cases, these tickets are not cheap, usually several hundred dollars. However, if you can’t afford tickets, there are always free and reduced price tickets available if you ask.
It is not fun asking. I have done it, and it was very embarrassing, and sometimes people made me feel more embarrassed than I had to because they were not great at their job.
But that is a lesson that we have around this YouTube channel, is that Jews and rabbis are humans, make mistakes, and sometimes are jerks. So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater if you have a bad experience trying to find reduced or free tickets.
I’ll link up here and down below to my video about synagogue tickets.
How are you getting to synagogue? Do you take public transportation? Can you walk? Do you need childcare?
Will there be a children’s service that your children can go to? Every community handles kids a little bit differently.
Do you need accessibility accommodations? Do you need to know where the handicapped entrance is?
These are all logistics that are good to plan ahead of time instead of being stressed out and trying to figure it out in the moment. ‘ Cause I can pretty much guarantee that if it’s your first time going to services on the High Holidays, you’re gonna be pretty stressed out at the moment of getting there.
You are going to be not in your right mind.
Um, do you need time off work? Which we already addressed that a little bit earlier. You can find that video down in the description below.
Are you going to host or attend meals at someone else’s house? Will you have guests? You don’t have to have guests.
And of course, it’s nice to be a guest, but one thing that I ran into was people telling me that Rosh Hashanah was like a “family” holiday, and they didn’t wanna have guests during that time. Whereas some years I had no trouble finding guest spots on Rosh Hashanah.
Your mileage will vary.
That’s a pretty good list to get you started on the practical logistics. Of course, you could go deeper with, like, planning a menu. Don’t make the meal too big. Just make it a little nicer than normal.
And I’ll link up here and down below to my video about how to start a Shabbat practice, because it’s also a really useful framework for how to start a holiday practice.
Next, I want you to spend some time thinking about what you actually want to do this year. And we’re not doing the High Holiday Pinterest Olympics around here.
Start small, start doable. There are lots of practices and customs that you could do for these holidays.
There’s services, of course. If you’re not going to services, there’s the prayers. There’s festive meals.
For Rosh Hashanah, apples and honey, hearing the shofar. There’s the Tashlich ritual between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
For each holiday, there is candle lighting, just like we do on Shabbat.
There is community, making time to be around other Jews.
And of course, resting and reflection.
You don’t have to choose all of these.
And if you’re converting and already have a rabbi, this is a great place to work with your rabbi about forming a practice that they would like you to be doing at this stage of your conversion.
Then next, more logistics. What do you need to buy or source from somewhere?
Many people like to buy new clothing for holidays. And on Yom Kippur, it’s also traditional that many people choose to wear white.
Do you need candles? Do you need a prayer book?
Make a budget for the meals you’re planning to do.
But make sure to check before purchasing if there are things that maybe you could borrow from someone or if someone is looking to give you hand-me-downs. Don’t buy when there is so much stuff already looking for a new home.
Don’t listen to TikTok when it tells you that you need to have everything brand new.
Now we come to learning. I want you to learn just enough to get by through these holidays. You don’t need to know everything. You’re not going to know everything. That’s okay. Everyone starts there. I started there, and I turned out okay. And you will, too.
I guarantee that in any synagogue you look in, there is multiple people who started where you are right now.
Not everyone in the room knows everything either. In fact, there may be people in the room who are not very far ahead of you.
The internet estimates that 10,000 people convert to Judaism every year. You are not alone.
I wish we had proper statistics, but we don’t.
And then as we are in Elul, I want you to take on one Elul practice. This is a month of reflection and preparation for the High Holidays. And yes, I want it to be about logistics preparation, but also try to pick at least one spiritual practice.
One of the most common practices is hearing the shofar each day except Shabbat. It’s supposed to be like a spiritual alarm clock, the alarm going off.
People also frequently read Psalm 27 each day. Many people journal and think about the last year and what they hope to bring in in the new year.
Many people also work on repairing a relationship. Who’s someone that you really owe an apology to? How can you make it up to them? I’ll link up here and down below to my video about apologies in Jewish tradition.
Or you could go really basic and just start a prayer practice. That’s a good place to start if you don’t already have a prayer practice.
Pick something that is going to be easy for you to do each day for the coming weeks.
And lastly, I want you to leave some things undone.
There will always be another custom you could adopt, another recipe you could cook, another text you could learn.
You’re allowed to know that something exists and still decide, “Not this year.”
If it helps you, you could even make a “not this year” list. Sometimes people like seeing what they can let go of written down because it gives them more of a feeling of permission to let it go.
And now, after the holidays, I want you to write notes. I want you to write down what was useful to you, what was not useful to you, what you would do differently, what you wish you had done.
Make notes to make your holiday better, and specifically to make your next Rosh Hashanah and High Holidays better.
The trick I like to do is I create a calendar event before the next holiday the next year, and I put my notes in it so that I come across it in the weeks before that next holiday. It’s usually really practical things like, uh, you need more disposable goods. You need to buy more Pyrex bowls.
Maybe you could decide that you wanna buy a machzor, a specialized prayer book before the next holiday. These are all things that could go in your notes.
You could even write out, um, that someone promised you that they would invite you over for that next holiday.
These notes will be your lifeblood. They are worth their weight in gold.
Make them very easy to access so that you will stumble upon them even if you don’t think to go looking for them, because you won’t think to go looking for them. You will forget they exist. Ask me how I know.
Now, if you wanna head into the High Holidays with more structure and a community who gets it, my membership, Bayit Builders, is open to new members right now.
You can learn more by clicking the link in the description below.
Now, if you want to know how to greet people during the High Holidays, watch this video next.
