There’s a particular kind of productive procrastination that happens when you’re exploring conversion to Judaism.
You don’t feel ready to contact a rabbi yet, so you decide to learn a little more first. You order a book. That book mentions six other books. Soon you’ve built an impressive Jewish library, spent several hundred dollars, and still don’t feel ready.
Books can help you build a Jewish life. They can also become a way to postpone building one.
You don’t need to know everything before you begin. You don’t even need to own everything you plan to read. But a few carefully chosen books can give you somewhere reliable to turn when the vocabulary, prayers, history, and competing Jewish opinions start piling up.
So which books are worth buying, rather than borrowing once and returning? In this video, I’m sharing the three I think every conversion candidate should actually own.
And if you’re ready for the practical information that doesn’t make it into introductory conversion books, join my mailing list and I’ll send you my FREE Conversion 101 ebook. It includes the tips, realities, and dirty laundry I learned through my own two conversions and more than 15 years of helping other conversion candidates navigate the process.
Transcript below.
Transcript:
When you decide to convert to Judaism, suddenly everyone has a book that you “just absolutely have to read!” Then that book recommends five other books, maybe 20 other books.
Before you know it, you spent $300 building a Jewish library, and you’re still avoiding emailing a rabbi.
That “not emailing the rabbi yet” because you’re not “ready,” that’s a different problem. The one we’re going to deal with first is “what are the first three books you should own?”
This question comes up all the time in my membership, Bayit Builders, and with the people that I consult with individually. Everyone wants to know where’s the best use of their dollars and their time.
So that’s what we’re gonna get into here. 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 also converted twice, first a conservative conversion, and then later a stricter Orthodox conversion.
And if you’re new to conversion, you might be interested in my new FREE e-book, Conversion 101. It’s all the tips and tricks and dirty laundry that you’re not gonna find anywhere else. You can get a free copy when you join my mailing list at the link in the description below.
And let me tell you about the thousands of dollars of Jewish books that I bought well before I was ever ready. And even to this day, nearly 20 years later, half of them are still unread.
I’ve known a lot of Jewish converts, and let me tell you, we are book hoarders. We love books. That is why we are attracted to the People of the Book.
I know you. You’re going and putting all these books in your Amazon cart. But which ones do you actually need to buy?
Because quite frankly, most of them you could just get through the library. You don’t need to own them for ongoing purposes. They’re a “read once and done” book.
And then if you really enjoy it and think you might reread it or want it for reference, then you could buy a copy.
So let’s talk about that library portion first for a little bit.
If you’re in a fairly metropolitan area, especially if it has a mid-size or bigger Jewish community, you may be able to find most of the books that you wanna read through your library system. They may not be at your particular branch, but they might be able to request it from another branch.
But even if you don’t have a local Jewish community driving the, uh, desire for Jewish books in your library system, there’s a thing called inter-library loan where your library can request from other library systems. In some places, like where I live, that’s a free service. Your tax dollars at work! But in some places it’s a quarter or maybe as much as a dollar.
I’ve never heard anyone having, uh, more than a dollar. But then again, you’ve seen this economy. Who knows what will happen to that?
But in this way, I was able to request a specific book that came all the way from a university library in Kansas. And I did it for free. Even if I had had to pay a dollar, that was a fraction of what I would have paid for even a used version of the book.
So definitely check in with your Reference Desk. That’s who usually runs these programs. And also, the reference desk is the place where you can ask them to buy a book that you wanna read. Libraries do generally take suggestions for books they should buy. They may not say yes, but it’s worth a shot.
You might be surprised what they’re willing to buy.
And then of course, don’t forget the used book market. These books that I’m gonna recommend to you don’t have to be brand new. Used copies are just fine.
So book one, a Tanach. You might also know this as the Hebrew Bible.
And with all the book recommendations I’m gonna be making in this video, I will put links to them down in the description below.
The word Tanakh is an acronym.
It’s the Torah, the five books of Moses at the beginning of the Tanakh. Nevi’im, which is the prophets, and Ketuvim, which is the writings.
Altogether, the Tanakh has 24 books.
You might also see a Jewish book out there called the Chumash or a Torah. Chumash and Torah can be used interchangeably for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.
So what you actually want is the Tanakh, which has all of the books.
” But I already own a Bible,” you say!
I understand why you might think that you can just keep the Christian Bible that you have and use that because it’s got the same books in front, right? Wrong.
Christian Old Testaments are fundamentally different from what you’ll find in a Jewish version.
You might find differences in like the order of the books and things like that, but more importantly, you’re going to find wildly different translation choices.
There are many translation choices that Christians made that make zero sense.
That’s how you get all of those Old Testament prophecies that supposedly point to Jesus. It’s because almost every one of them is mistranslated, sometimes intentionally.
And even the translations that aren’t just wildly off base, they’re still gonna be picking translations from a Christian framework with an end goal in mind of verifying the story of Christianity. You need a Jewish translation.
There’s a couple of reliable sources I would recommend for you.
Probably the widest use translation as far as I’ve been able to see is the JPS, the Jewish Publication Society.
I own it. It’s a solid translation. It’s a really good book.
The other two suggestions I have are Orthodox, and it’s just two different publishers. ArtScroll is one publisher and Koren, K-O-R-E-N, is the other.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of the ArtScroll translation.
It really has a way of, like, taming stuff down so it’s not as, like, scandalous. Like it’s just they try to put it in like a neater little package, I feel like.
The Koren Tanakh I actually haven’t read. I just don’t have a copy of it and haven’t run into a copy of it in the w- in the wild. But I can tell you from the prayer books published between Artscroll and Koren that in general I have found Koren books to be easier to read, like there is more white space and the fonts are just much cleaner to read and, um, and laid out in a really easy way on the eyes.
And also in their siddur- in their prayer books, the translation is really excellent. So my guess is their translation in their Tanakh is probably also really top-notch.
If price is a factor, generally the JPS is going to be your cheapest, and it is perfectly acceptable.
It’s also the version that you’re a lot more likely to find in used copies, ‘ cause it’s just a much wider-owned book.
My one exception to this advice is if you’re involved in a synagogue or a class that uses a different version of the Tanakh. I would use what your community uses, especially if it’s a class because then it’s much easier to follow along with page numbers and things like that.
If you’re ever curious about the translation of a certain verse, you can use the free resource Sefaria, which I’ll link down below too. It has many translations in multiple languages of Tanakh available, and it’s all free.
Book two, a siddur. That’s a prayer book. (All siddur choices and links here: Which Siddur Should I Choose?)
Jewish prayer is highly structured as a general rule. Your mileage may vary, especially in the Renewal or Reconstructionist synagogues.
So this style of prayer can be kind of a shock to the system if you’re coming from a place where most prayer was done off the cuff and in your own words.
Don’t get me wrong, you can also pray in your own words anytime you want, but we do have a fixed order of prayers. And personally, I think it’s important for people to dig into the prayers really early in the process.
And the prayers differ on the time, both in the day and through the months. There are morning prayers, afternoon prayers, and evening prayers. There’s also different prayers on Shabbat and different prayers on holidays, and each holiday is different. It’s a lot to keep up with.
Our prayer book is not small.
And you’re gonna need to pay attention to the instructions in the prayer book. It’s gonna have little instructions above sections like, um, “Bow at these words. Stand up at these words.”
” This prayer is only recited with a minyan, which is a prayer quorum of 10 Jews. ” So you wouldn’t pray that when you’re praying on your own. It could also have instructions for “this is said on Rosh Hashanah.” Stuff like that. It’s very user-friendly once you get over the hump of being scared by how big and complicated it looks, especially the Artscroll version if you have that.
It’s just very cluttered on the page. There’s a lot going on.
So which siddur you should buy is a very person-specific question. If you have a synagogue that you’re already involved in, I would buy the siddur that they use.
However, if you are not involved in a Jewish community yet, and I’ll link up here and down below to my video about how to contact a rabbi about conversion without ruining your chances.
So if you’re not involved with a community yet, what I recommend is that you get an Orthodox prayer book, a traditional prayer book.
All of the non-Orthodox prayer books are fundamentally based on the traditional prayer book. So it’s going to have the most resources, and anything you have after that is going to be present in there.
And even if you are buying a non-Orthodox prayer book, I do think it’s worth owning a copy of a traditional prayer book so that you can see how the prayers changed over time and how other people do it. I think being able to have that comparison helps you understand your Judaism better.
So in the Orthodox space, there’s two major prayer books. Kinda like what we were talking with the Tanakh, there is the ArtScroll and the Koren. And as I said above, the Koren is cleaner, has a lot more white space, the font is easier to read. And the translation is excellent.
The Artscroll is the one that is found in the majority of Orthodox synagogues. It is the one you are most likely to run into in the wild, by far.
So there’s something to be said for using the prayer book that you use at synagogue. So if you are wanting to be Orthodox, you might wanna go with the Artscroll just because that’s gonna be the one you’re gonna encounter the most.
And any English-speaking synagogue you walk into is going to have the Artscroll available.
This is especially important when you’re praying in English, because over time you’re going to memorize these prayers in English, just as people who say them in Hebrew all the time memorize the Hebrew.
And it’s kinda disconcerting to have a version of the English prayers memorized and then pray from a different prayer book that has a different English translation. It can kinda trip you up, and it can knock you out of the right head space. And if you’re also neurodivergent like me, it can really throw you off.
So if push comes to shove, I will generally recommend the Artscroll over the Koren. But I feel kind of bad doing it because the Koren’s a really good one.
But before you run off to go buy your prayer book, there is another question you need to ask, which is nusach, which is, I guess you would translate it as tradition. There is three major ones that you will find in the publishers today.
There is Ashkenazi, which is the majority of English-speaking Jews, Sfardi, and then Sfarad or Chabad.
So many of you, especially those who live in far-flung places, you will probably have your first interactions with Judaism with a Chabad, which is a Hasidic, um, ultra-Orthodox organization. As compared to, say, modern Orthodox, which is like mainstream Orthodoxy, the majority of Orthodox people in, in America.
So for most people, if you’re just a random white person from America, Ashkenazi is probably going to be where you go.
Ashkenaz means coming from those Eastern European communities. And that’s like 80 or 90% of American Jewry.
If you attend a synagogue that uses Sfardi you will know it. It will be very proudly Sfardi. There are very few of them and in only certain regions of the United States.
If you only have one or two synagogues in your town, I can almost guarantee that they are all Ashkenazi. with the exception of Chabad, which is called Sefard, which is of course incredibly confusing between Sefardi and Sefard, ‘ cause all that changes is that one little I at the end.
So once you have chosen a publisher for your prayer book, then you need to choose a nusach. And if you’re not involved in a synagogue, I would go with the Ashkenazi version.
If you later join a Sfardi congregation, you can buy a Sfardi siddur at that time. The odds are just kind of against it. Even if you personally would fall into the ethnicities that tend to be Sefardi, like, um like most South American people.
And then once you’ve figured out which tradition you wanna use, then there is what prayers. ‘Cause there are different versions to make the prayer books easier to handle, not so big. There is a full siddur that has Shabbat, and holidays, and the regular daily prayers. That is what you’re gonna wanna pick.
But you will see varieties that are specifically just Shabbat and holidays. That’s not the one you want. You also want the weekday prayers. Alternatively, you could get a siddur that is just the weekday prayers.
But for the sake of saving money, I would go with the all-in-one prayer book to begin with.
There are free versions of siddurs on Sefaria, but to my knowledge, all of them are very old, talking about thees and thous. So while they can be useful for research or curiosity, I don’t think they’re the best for everyday use.
Now, the third book is actually an addition to what I originally advocated on my blog back in, like, 2011. Back then, I just recommended the siddur and the Tanakh. But now I know better, so I’m gonna do better, and I’m gonna recommend that you also get a copy of Jewish Literacy by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.
So the Tanakh gives you the foundational Jewish texts. The siddur gives you the prayers. Jewish Literacy helps you understand what the heck everyone’s talking about.
It is essentially a small encyclopedia of Judaism. There are short, accessible entries on almost anything Jewish you can think of.
From biblical figures to famous rabbis to what is a shofar. It’s not a narrative book that you just read your way through.
You’re gonna read it in fits and starts or just keep it as a reference and just go to it when you come across a word that you don’t understand.
Even though it is small for an encyclopedia, it’s a really big book. It would take you a while to read.
So over time, and do take your time, you’ll slowly close the gaps in your Jewish background knowledge.
Now that you have some books to dig into, if you want to learn more about how conversion works, check out The Ultimate Guide to Jewish Conversion.
