If you’re new to Jewish practice, figuring out where to start can be surprisingly overwhelming. Should you light Shabbat candles? Start keeping kosher? Pray every day? Study Torah? Go to synagogue?
The good news – there isn’t one perfect first practice. In this video, I’ll give you three questions to help you choose something meaningful, realistic, and sustainable for your life.
🕯️ Want to start with Shabbat? Get my FREE Shabbat “Menu” when you join my mailing list, with a whole “menu” of practices you can mix and match to begin building a Shabbat practice that works for you.
🏠 The Bayit opens to new members August 27 – September 3, 2026! If you want ongoing support as you build a real Jewish life, join the waitlist for early access and a special bonus.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
If you ask 10 rabbis what Jewish practice a beginner should start with, you’ll probably get 10 different answers. If you haven’t already heard the old joke, two Jews, three opinions.
But the question stands, what is the best or easiest practice for a beginner to start with? It could be lighting Shabbat candles, stopping eating pork, starting to pray every day, making a blessing before you eat, giving tzedakah, charity, in either time or money, Torah study, studying the parsha, other Jewish learning, attend synagogue for one service a week, say the short prayer Modeh Ani first thing in the morning.
There are so many places you could start It is absolutely paralyzing. You get analysis paralysis.
There are too many options, so you don’t choose anything, because what if it’s the wrong choice?
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.
I actually made a free resource kind of along these lines called The Shabbat “Menu.” It’s not actually about food. It’s about a menu of choices that you could do to start a Shabbat practice. You can mix and match depending on where you are in your circumstances. So if you’re wondering where to start, this is one place you could start.
Just join my mailing list at the link down below, and you can get it for free.
Hey, future editing Kochava here. I completely forgot to mention that my membership Bayit Builders is opening to new members August 27th through September 3rd, 2026.
If you want support building a real Jewish life, this is the only membership out there to do that.
You can learn more at the link down in the description below. Back to our regularly scheduled program!
So I’ve worked with a lot of conversion candidates over the years, and let me tell you, we are perfectionists. We are very concerned about doing things the right way, and a lot of that comes down to the right order.
But Judaism doesn’t work that way.
It’s more like learning a foreign language. You don’t master the grammar before you start speaking. You learn a few words, then you learn a few more, then you try speaking. You make a ton of mistakes and look kind of foolish, but you got your point across, and eventually everything starts connecting together.
So unfortunately, the bad news is there is no perfect first practice. There is no order to go in, which is freeing and good news, but then it becomes so overwhelming, that analysis paralysis.
You don’t know what to choose, so you choose nothing at all. You put off the decision saying, “I don’t know the answer right now. Let’s revisit it in a week.”
And then you say again, “Let’s revisit that a little bit later.”
And you just keep pushing and pushing it away.
So I want you to ask a different question: What’s one Jewish practice I can realistically still be doing six months from now?
Consistency matters more than ambition.
We know you’ve got ambition. You wanna do all the things, but you gotta start somewhere.
So don’t choose the practice you think you “should” do. Choose the one you’ll actually keep doing.
I’d rather see someone only light Friday night candles for Shabbat for 10 years rather than do a whole big Shabbat practice for two weekends and then leave Judaism altogether because it’s too complicated.
That’s what happens when you try to go zero to 60. Most of those people leave Judaism entirely because it feels too overwhelming, too much.
‘Cause there are a lot of moving parts.
It’s that old joke about how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
Because this is really big.
Jewish life isn’t built on one dramatic decision. It’s built through hundreds, thousands of small decisions.
I spent so much time worrying that I was not doing Judaism in the right order. Don’t be me. It took me way too long to learn the lesson that repetition is far more important than perfection
As a general rule, as a beginner, your efforts are going to be imperfect.
That’s okay. That’s expected. It’s part of the process. And so many of us have been in those same shoes. We have been right where you are now, and we took imperfect action, and it was stressful, and it was sometimes embarrassing, and we sometimes felt like we were failing, but it paid off in the end.
There’s another old quote, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” because that’s how you start as a beginner.
So in order to decide what Jewish practice you wanna take on first, I have three questions for you.
What already feels meaningful? Do you love learning? Are you someone who connects deeply with prayer? Are you a history nerd? Do you need the rest of Shabbat? Maybe you really like hosting guests. The options are endless.
What lights you up? When you choose things that are meaningful and valuable to you, you’re more likely to continue it because it will be self-rewarding.
Question two: What fits your actual life, not your ideal future self? We spend so much of our time planning our lives as though we had ideal circumstances, but we don’t have ideal circumstances.
Life is messy. Maybe you’re a parent, maybe you’re a caregiver to your parents, maybe you have a demanding job, maybe you’re disabled, maybe you’re neurodivergent. What real situation are you dealing with, and how does that affect your Jewish practice?
Some things will be easier or harder for you specifically. What are those, and how can you make these practices work with your real life?
And question three: Can you see yourself doing this six months from now? Not perfectly, just consistently.
If the answer is no, shrink it. Make the goal smaller. One blessing, one mitzvah that’s part of a bigger mitzvah, like maybe candlelighting for Shabbat or hosting people for Shabbat rather than a big Shabbat practice.
Small is not failure. Small is sustainable, and it lays a foundation you can build upon.
All of those options of mitzvot that I gave you at the beginning of this video, none of them are “correct.” They’re all great options, and they’re gonna be better options for some people than for others. They’re appropriate for different people.
My own bias is that one of your earlier practices, doesn’t have to be the first one or even in the first five, but soon you should start to incorporate some aspect of Shabbat into your life each week.
And if you wanna know how to do that in a really small and sustainable way, watch this video next about planning your first Shabbat experience.
