Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  I don’t do much better on my errand to Mail Boxes Etc. I want to xerox a half dozen copies of the Ten Commandments so I can Scotch tape them up all over the apartment, figuring it’d be a good memory aid.

  The Bible says, those with good sense are “slow to anger” (Proverbs 19:11). So when I get there at the same time as this wiry fortyish woman, and she practically sprints to the counter to beat me in line, I try not to be annoyed.

  And when she tells the Mail Boxes Etc. employee to copy something on the one and only functioning Xerox machine, I try to shrug it off. And when she pulls out a stack of pages that looks like the collected works of J. K. Rowling and plunks it on the counter, I say to myself: “Slow to anger, slow to anger.”

  After which she asks some complicated question involving paper stock…

  I remind myself: Remember what happened when the Israelites were waiting for Moses while he was up on the mountaintop for forty days? They got impatient, lost faith, and were struck with a plague.

  Oh, and she pays by check. And asks for a receipt. And asks to get the receipt initialed. The Proverbs—a collection of wisdom in the Old Testament—say that smiling makes you happy. Which is actually backed up by psychological studies. So I stand there with a flight attendant–like grin frozen on my face. But inside, I am full of wrath.

  I don’t have time for this. I have a seventy-two-page-list of other biblical tasks to do.

  I finally make it to the counter and give the cashier a dollar. She scoops my thirty-eight cents of change from the register and holds it out for me to take.

  “Could you, uh, put the change on the counter?” I ask.

  She glares at me. I’m not supposed to touch women—more on that later—so I am simply trying to avoid unnecessary finger-to-finger contact.

  “I have a cold,” I say. “I don’t want to give it to you.”

  A complete lie. In trying to avoid one sin, I committed another.

  I walk home. I pass by a billboard that features two well-toned naked people clutching hungrily at each other’s bodies. It’s an ad for a gym. The Bible’s teachings on sexuality are complicated, and I haven’t figured them out yet. But to be safe, I figure I should avoid lust for now. I keep my eyes on the ground for the rest of the walk home.

  When I get back to my apartment, I decide to cross Numbers 15:38 off my list: Attach tassels to the corners of my garment. Inspired by my ex-uncle Gil, I had purchased some tassels from a website called “Tassels without Hassles.” They look like the kind of tassels on the corners of my grandmother’s needlepoint pillows. I spend ten minutes safety pinning them to my shirtsleeves and hem.

  By the evening, I’m bushed. I barely have the energy to listen to Julie talk about the U.S. Open—and even that conversation is fraught. I have to be sure to avoid mentioning Venus Williams, since she’s named for the Roman goddess of love, and it would violate Exodus 23:13 (make no mention of other gods).

  As I go to bed, I wonder whether or not I took a step toward enlightenment today. Probably not. I was so busy obsessing over the rules—a lot of which still seem thoroughly insane—that I didn’t have time to think. Maybe I’m like a student driver who spends every moment checking the blinkers and speedometer, too nervous to contemplate the scenery. But it’s just the first day.

  “Be fruitful and multiply…”

  —GENESIS 1:28

  Day 2. My beard grows fast. I’m already starting to look a little seedy, somewhere between a Brooklyn hipster and a guy who loiters at the OTB all day. Which is fine by me. I’m enjoying the hiatus from shaving. I may be spending all sorts of time on biblical duties, but at least I’m not wasting three minutes each morning in front of the mirror.

  For breakfast, I grab an orange from the refrigerator. Food is going to be tricky this year. The Bible bans many things: pork, shrimp, rabbit, eagle, and osprey, among others. But citrus is fine. Plus, oranges have been around since biblical times—one of my books even says that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was an orange. It certainly wasn’t an apple, since there were no apples in the Middle East of Adam’s day.

  I sit down at the kitchen table. Julie is flipping through the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times trying to decide on a movie for Saturday night.

  “Should we see The Aristocrats?” Julie asks.

  Huh. The Aristocrats is the documentary about the dirtiest joke ever. It contains at least a half dozen sex acts specifically banned by the Book of Leviticus. Julie could not come up with a worse suggestion for an evening activity. Is she testing me? She’s got to be.

  “I don’t think I can. It doesn’t sound very biblical.”

  “You serious?”

  I nod.

  “Fine. We’ll see something else.”

  “I don’t know if I should be seeing movies at all. I have to think about that.”

  Julie lowers her gaze and looks at me over the top of her glasses.

  “No movies? For a year?”

  I’m going to have to choose my battles these next twelve months. I decide I’ll bend on this one for now—I’ll phase out movies slowly, giving Julie a little grace period.

  Things, after all, are kind of tense in our house right now. Julie had a hard time getting pregnant with our first child, as I mentioned in my last book. We did eventually succeed (we have a son named Jasper), but apparently, practice did not make perfect, because the second time around is just as much of an ordeal.

  In the last year, I’ve been—as the Bible says—uncovering Julie’s nakedness. A lot. Too much. Not that I dislike it, but enough is enough, you know? It gets tiring. Plus, Julie’s getting increasingly frustrated with me because she thinks I’m micromanaging—always quizzing her about ovulation times and basal temperatures and her five-day forecast.

  “You’re stressing me out, and it’s really counterproductive,” she told me the other day.

  “I’m just trying to stay involved.”

  “You know what? The more stressed out I am, the less chance there is that I’ll get pregnant.”

  I tell her I want our son, Jasper, to have a little sibling.

  “Then please stop talking about it.”

  So we’re in this weird elephant-in-the-room phase where we’re both thinking about having a second child, but studiously avoiding the topic.

  This is especially hard for someone who spends as much time as I do reading and pondering the Bible. Fertility is one of the most dominant themes in the Bible—probably the dominant theme of Genesis. If you believe some of the more modern biblical scholars, Genesis reflects a nature/fertility stage of monotheism, an influence of the pagan sects. In fact, the very first command that God gives to Adam is “Be fruitful and multiply.” It’s the Alpha Rule of the Bible.

  Now, if I were taking the Bible absolutely literally, I could be “fruitful” by loading up on peaches at Whole Foods Market and “multiply” by helping my niece with her algebra homework. I could scratch this commandment off my list in twenty minutes flat.

  This hammers home a simple but profound lesson: When it comes to the Bible, there is always—but always—some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules. In this case, I’m pretty sure that the Bible was talking about fertility, not math, so that’s what I’ll continue to pursue.

  Conception was a huge preoccupation of the ancients. If you think about it, many of the Bible’s most famous stories center on the quest to get pregnant. Abraham and Sarah probably had the hardest time conceiving of anyone in the Bible, if not history. At one point, the seemingly barren Sarah became so distraught, she lent her Egyptian handmaiden to Abraham as a concubine. That union produced Ishmael, the forefather of Islam. A few verses later, God and two angels visited Abraham and Sarah’s tent and announced that Sarah would soon be pregnant. Sarah’s reaction? She laughed, presumably with skepticism. In her defense, she was ninety years old. But God fulfilled his promise, and the nonagenarian matriarch gave birth to Isaac—Hebrew for “he will laugh.”
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  And then there’s Rachel. Rachel and her older sister Leah were both married to the clever shepherd (and my namesake) Jacob. Leah was a procreation machine—giving birth to no fewer than six sons and a daughter. But Rachel remained childless and heartbroken. At one point she said to Jacob, “Give me children or I shall die!” Another time, Rachel bought some mandrakes from her sister—mandrakes are a Mediterranean herb once thought to be an infertility cure. But it was to no avail. Finally God “opened Rachel’s womb,” and she gave birth to Joseph, he of the multicolored coat.

  There is an upside to the Bible’s infertility motif: The harder it was for a woman to get pregnant, the greater was the resulting child. Joseph. Isaac. Samuel (whose mother pledged her son to God as thanks for the conception). These are some of the giants of the Hebrew Scriptures.

  Yesterday I broke Julie’s gag rule to inform her that if we do have another kid, he or she could be one for the ages. Which made her smile.

  “I think that’s true,” she said. “Good things come to those who wait.” Which sounds like a biblical proverb but is actually from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  You shall have no other gods before me.

  —EXODUS 20:3

  Back to day 2. Julie has a meeting, so I’m left alone with my breakfast orange, my list of rules, and my stack of Bibles. I’ve got a half hour before our son, Jasper, wakes up. Now seems a good time to embark on the more spiritual part of my quest: prayer.

  As I said, I’ve always been agnostic. In college I studied all the traditional arguments for the existence of God: the design argument (just as a watch must have a watchmaker, so the universe must have a God), the first-cause argument (everything has a cause; God is the cause of the universe). Many were dazzling and brilliant, but in the end, none of them swayed me.

  Nor did a new line of reasoning I heard from my cousin Levi a couple of weeks ago. Levi—the son-in-law of my Orthodox aunt Kate—told me he believes in God for this reason: The Bible is so strange, so utterly bizarre, no human brain could have come up with it.

  I like Levi’s argument. It’s original and unsanctimonious. And I agree that the Bible can be strange—the command to break a cow’s neck at the site of an unsolved murder comes to mind (Deuteronomy 21:4). Still, I wasn’t convinced. Humans have come up with some astoundingly bizarre stuff ourselves: biathlons, turducken, and my son’s Chicken Dance Elmo, to name a few.

  In short, I don’t think I can be debated into believing in God. Which presents a problem, because the Bible commands you not only to believe in God but to love Him. It commands this over and over again. So how do I follow that? Can I turn on a belief as if it flows out of a spiritual spigot?

  Here’s my plan: In college I also learned about the theory of cognitive dissonance. This says, in part, if you behave in a certain way, your beliefs will eventually change to conform to your behavior. So that’s what I’m trying to do. If I act like I’m faithful and God loving for several months, then maybe I’ll become faithful and God loving. If I pray every day, then maybe I’ll start to believe in the Being to whom I’m praying.

  So now, I’m going to pray. Even though I’m not exactly sure how to pray. I’ve never prayed before in my life, not counting the few perfunctory uplifted gazes when my mom was sick.

  For starters, what do I do with my body? The Bible describes a multitude of positions: People kneel, sit, bow their heads, lift their eyes skyward, put their heads between their knees, raise up their hands, beat their breasts. There’s no single method.

  Sitting is tempting, but it seems too easy. I’m of the no-pain, no-gain mind-set. So I settle on holding my arms outstretched like a holy antenna, hoping to catch God’s signal.

  As for what to say, I’m not sure. I don’t feel confident enough to improvise yet, so I’ve memorized a few of my favorite prayers from the Bible. I walk into our living room, stand in front of our brown sectional couch, hold out my arms, bow my head, and, in a low but clear voice, recite this passage from the Book of Job: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  It’s a beautiful passage, but I feel odd uttering it. I’ve rarely said the word Lord, unless it’s followed by of the Rings. I don’t often say God without preceding it with Oh my.

  The whole experience is making me uncomfortable. My palms are sweaty. I’m trying to speak with earnest intent, but it feels like I’m transgressing on two separate levels. First, I feel like I’m violating some sort of taboo issued by the agnostic high priests. Worse, what if I’m breaking the Third Commandment? If I don’t believe the holy words I’m saying, isn’t that taking the Lord’s name in vain?

  I glance at the clock. I’ve been praying only for a minute. I’ve promised myself I’d try to pray for at least ten minutes three times a day.

  So I get back to work. I squint my eyes and try to visualize Him. It’s a fiasco. My mind goes to a series of clichés: the Universe, aka the view from inside the Hayden Planetarium; a fog-shrouded Middle Eastern mountain; something akin to the multicolored special effects from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the spaceship went into hyperspace. Pretty much everything but the guy in the flowing white robe and the basso profundo voice.

  All I can say is, I hope I get better.

  And it is possible I will. When I was in high school, I had a handful of what might qualify as quasimystical experiences. Surprisingly, none involved a bong. They would happen unexpectedly, and they would last only for a moment, about as long as a sneeze, but they were memorable.

  The only way to describe them makes me sound like I’m leading an est seminar, but so be it: I felt at one with the universe. I felt the boundary between my brain and the rest of the world suddenly dissolve. It wasn’t that I intellectually comprehended that everything and everyone is connected, I felt it the way one might feel cold or carsick. The epiphanies would descend on me without warning: One came while I was lying on a blanket in Central Park’s Great Lawn, another while I was riding the bullet train on a family trip in Japan. They were at once utterly humbling (my life so piddling and insignificant) and totally energizing (but it’s also part of something so huge). The glow from these mental orgasms would last several days, making me, at least temporarily, more serene and Buddha-like.

  For no reason I can think of, my epiphanies suddenly stopped around senior year of high school. Perhaps this year will give me the map to find them again. Or else make me conclude my brain was playing two-bit mind tricks on me.

  Nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff.

  —LEVITICUS 19:19

  Day 5. I’ve made a list of the Top Five Most Perplexing Rules in the Bible. I plan to tackle all five this year, but I figured I’d start with one that requires neither violence nor pilgrimages. Namely: the ban on wearing clothes made of mixed fibers. It’s such an odd proscription, I figured there was zero chance that anyone else in America was trying to follow it.

  Of course, I was flat wrong.

  My friend Eddy Portnoy—who teaches history at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary—told me he recently spotted a flyer in Washington Heights advertising a shatnez tester. Shatnez, he informed me, is the Hebrew word for “mixed fibers.” A tester will come to your home and inspect your shirts, pants, sweaters, and suits to make sure you have no hidden mixed fibers.

  So today I dial the number, and a man named Mr. Berkowitz agrees to make a house call. Mr. Berkowitz arrives right on time. He has a gray beard that descends below his collar, large glasses, and a black tie tucked into the top of his pants, which sit a good six inches above his navel. His yarmulke is slightly askew.

  Mr. Berkowitz clicks open his black American Tourister rolling suitcase. Inside, his tools: a microscope, an old canister with the faded label “vegetable flakes,” and various instruments that look like my mother’s sewing kit after a genetic mutation. He spreads them out on my living room table. M
r. Berkowitz reminds me of an Orthodox CSI. God’s wardrobe detective.

  He gives me a shatnez primer. Shatnez is not just any mixed fiber. Poly-cotton blends and Lycra-spandex blends—those are fine. The problem is mixing wool and linen. That’s the forbidden combination, according to Deuteronomy 22:11 (the Bible’s only other verse that talks about mixed fibers).

  “How do you tell when something is shatnez?” I ask.

  Well, you can’t trust the clothing labels, explains Mr. Berkowitz. They’re often inaccurate. “You have to look at the fibers yourself. All the fibers look different under the microscope,” he says.

  He draws me a diagram: Linen looks like a piece of bamboo. Wool is like a bunch of stacked cups. Cotton resembles twisted streamers. And polyester is smooth, like a straw.

  I bring out a pile of sweaters, and he goes to work. He snips some threads off a black V-necked sweater and puts them under the microscope.

  “See if you can tell,” he says. I squint into the microscope.

  “It’s polyester,” I say.

  “No. Look. The stacked cups? It’s wool.”

  He seems disappointed. Clearly I’m not a shatnez inspector protégé. Mr. Berkowitz is kind, gentle, but persistently frazzled. And I wasn’t helping matters.

  Mr. Berkowitz makes some notes on a sheet that looks like a hospital chart. The sweater is kosher, he tells me. So is the next one I bring out.

  “Look,” he says, motioning to the microscope.

  “Wool?” I say.

  “No. Cotton.”

  Damn!

  I bring out my wedding suit. This could be trouble, he says: Wool suits often have linen hiding somewhere in them, especially Italian suits, which this is.

  Mr. Berkowitz gets out a tool that resembles a fondue fork and begins digging into various parts of my suit—the collar, the pockets, the sleeves—with something approaching ferocity. This suit is the only suit I own, and it cost me about one-third of my salary. I’m a little alarmed. I’m glad Julie’s not here to see this.