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

by A. J. Jacobs

  “Is it shatnez?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer for a minute. He’s too busy with the microscope. His beard is squashed around the eyepiece.

  “I have a strong suspicion this is linen,” he says. The alleged culprit is some white canvas that was hiding under the suit’s collar.

  Mr. Berkowitz spins the fabric with his fingers.

  “I’m sending it to the laboratory to make sure, but I am almost convinced it is linen.” He tells me I’ll have to put my only suit into storage, or get it de-linened by a tailor.

  Mr. Berkowitz seems suddenly unfrazzled. He is relieved.

  “It’s joyous,” he says. “If I save someone from breaking a commandment, it gives me a little high.” He pumps his fist. “I never took drugs, but I imagine this is what it feels like.”

  His joy is infectious. I feel momentarily happy too, but then return to my baseline bewilderment.

  “It’s really that important not to wear linen and wool?” I ask.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Are some commandments in the Bible more important than others?”

  “All equal,” he says. Then pauses. “Well, I can’t say that. Not murdering is at a very high level. So are adultery and not worshipping idols.”

  He seems torn. On the one hand, all the rules are from the same place. The Orthodox Jews follow a list of 613 rules originally compiled by the great medieval rabbi Maimonides from the first five books of the Bible. On the other hand, Mr. Berkowitz also has to admit that homicide is worse than wearing an unkosher blazer.

  Before Mr. Berkowitz leaves, I ask him the obvious staring-us-in-the-face question: Why? Why would God care if we wore mixed fibers?

  The answer is: We don’t know.

  There are theories. Some say it was to train the ancient Hebrews to keep things separate so they’d be less inclined to intermarry. Some say it’s an allusion to Cain and Abel’s sacrifice—Cain offered flax to God, and Abel offered sheep. Some say that the heathens once wore the combination, and the Hebrews were trying to distinguish themselves from the pagans in any way they could.

  Bottom line, though: We have no idea.

  “This is a law that God gave us. We have to trust Him. He’s all-powerful. We’re like children. Sometimes parents have laws children don’t understand. Like when you tell a child not to touch fire, he doesn’t understand why, but it is good for him.”

  In Judaism, the biblical laws that come without explanation—and there are many—are called chukim. This is such a law. The point is, you can never know what is important in the long term. God might have a different measuring scale than us. In fact, some say it’s more crucial to follow the inexplicable ones, because it shows you’re committed, that you have great faith.

  The notion of obeying laws that have no rational explanation is a jarring one. For most of my life, I’ve been working under the paradigm that my behavior should, ideally, have a logical basis. But if you live biblically, this is not true. I have to adjust my brain to this.

  You shall not covet.

  —EXODUS 20:17

  Day 6. After a day devoted to the obscure, I’m craving some good old-fashioned Ten Commandments to bring me back into the mainstream.

  Since I break this commandment every day, I decide “You shall not covet” is most in need of immediate attention. This commandment is the final one of the ten, and the only one to regulate a state of mind, not behavior. It’s also arguably the hardest, especially in modern-day New York. This is a city that runs on coveting.

  It’s 2:00 p.m., and here’s the list of things I’ve coveted since I woke up:

  Jonathan Safran Foer’s speaking fee (someone told me he gets fifteen thousand dollars per lecture).

  the Treo 700 PDA.

  the mental calm of the guy at the Bible bookstore who said he had no fear because he walked with God.

  our friend Elizabeth’s sprawling suburban front yard.

  the George Clooney level of fame that allows you to say whatever you feel like, moronic or not.

  the brilliant screenplay for the 1999 movie Office Space. (I sometimes have a weird fantasy that I could go back to 1997 with a videotape, transcribe the dialogue, and beat writer Mike Judge to the punch.)

  Plus, ever since I became a father, I’ve been introduced to a whole new level of coveting. I’m not just coveting for myself, I’m coveting for my son. I’m trying to keep up with the Jones’s kid.

  Like with Jasper’s vocabulary. I love the guy, but he’s distressingly behind the curve in the speaking department. He communicates mostly by using eight different types of grunts, each one with its own meaning. I feel like the ethnographer who had to decipher the nuances of the twenty-three Eskimo words for snow. A medium-pitched grunt means “yes.” A lower-pitched grunt means “no.” A brief chimplike grunt means “come here now!” Jasper’s a great walker and ball thrower, but words—those things I’m supposed to arrange for a living—they’re not so interesting to him.

  Meanwhile, his friend Shayna—three months his junior—knows words like helicopter and cabinet. She’s practically got her own blog. I covet Shayna’s vocabulary for Jasper.

  To sum up, I expend a lot of mental energy breaking this commandment. And I’m not even including “coveting” in the sexual sense—though I certainly did that with the woman in purple flip-flops on the street. Or the woman with the low-riding Calvins. Or…I’ll return to that topic later, since it deserves its own chapter.

  The full anticoveting commandment reads like this: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

  The ox and the ass aren’t a problem in postagrarian Manhattan. But the phrase “anything that is your neighbor’s”—that pretty much covers it all. No wiggle room.

  But how do you stop yourself from coveting?

  The word covet is a translation of the Hebrew root hamad, roughly equivalent to “desire” or “want.” There are two schools of thought on what the commandment is preventing.

  Some interpreters say that coveting in itself isn’t forbidden. It’s not always bad to yearn. It’s coveting your neighbor’s stuff that’s forbidden. As one rabbi puts it, it’s OK to covet a Jaguar—but you shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s Jaguar. In other words, if your desire might lead you to harm your neighbor, then it’s wrong.

  But others say that coveting any Jaguar is wrong, whether it’s your neighbor’s or the one at the dealership. A moderate interest in cars is OK. However, coveting means that you are overly desirous of the Jaguar, you are distracted by material goods, you have veered from the path of being thankful for what God provides. You have, no doubt, fallen victim to advertising, the Tenth Commandment’s arch-nemesis.

  To play it safe, I’m trying to avoid both types of coveting.

  Julie rejects one of my strategies—I asked her to censor the newspapers and magazines by ripping out all the ads for iPods and Jamaican vacations and such. Instead I’ve been forced to cut down my magazine consumption to a trickle.

  But coveting material goods in ads isn’t the big hurdle for me. My real weakness is jealousy of others. The relentless comparison to my peers. Am I more successful than Julie’s ex-boyfriend who invented a lighting gadget that fits over the page of a book so you can read it at night? It’s been featured on the cover of the Levenger catalog, as my mother-in-law reminds me often.

  If it’s not the ex-boyfriend, it’s someone else. And this type of coveting will never be assuaged. If by some crazy quirk or twist of fate or accounting error, I were to get J. S. Foer’s speaking fee, then I’d move right on to coveting Madeleine Albright’s speaking fee. The Bible is right. Jealousy is a useless, time-wasting emotion that’s eating me alive. I should focus on my family and, nowadays, God.

  Of course, stopping an emotion is not easy. The prevailing paradigm is that we can’t control our passions. As Woody Allen said when
his affair with Soon-Yi Previn was discovered, “The heart wants what it wants.” But I can’t just give up—I need a new point of view. So I consult my spiritual advisory board.

  One recommended method is to tell yourself that the coveted car/ job/house/speaking fee/donkey is just not a possibility. A medieval rabbi—Abraham ibn Ezra—uses this example (he’s talking about the sexual sense of covet, but you can apply it more broadly): When you see a pretty woman married to another man, you have to put her in the same class as your mother. She’s off-limits. The very notion of her as a sex partner is repulsive, unthinkable, except to perverts and/or those who have read too much Freud. Or else, think of the woman as a peasant would a princess. She’s pretty, but she’s so far out of your realm, your admiration is abstract, not lascivious.

  I try to do this with J. S. Foer’s speaking fee. It’s outside of my realm, I say. The strategy runs counter to you-can-do-anything-you-set-your-mind-to ambition, but maybe it’s better for my mental health.

  And then there’s this tactic: If you’re intently focused on following the rules of the Bible, you don’t have time to covet. Not as much, anyway. You’re just too busy. A couple of weeks ago, my daily coveting list would have taken up one-third of this book. Now I’ve trimmed it down to half a page. Progress, I think.

  You shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.

  —LEVITICUS 23:40

  Day 7. It’s been a week. My spiritual state: still agnostic. My beard state: itchy and uneven—I’ve got these bald patches that look like crop circles made by tiny UFOs. My wardrobe state: I’ve traded my usual T-shirts and jeans for khakis and Oxfords because it feels somehow more respectful. My emotional state: strung out.

  The learning curve remains crushingly steep. I continue to second-guess everything I do and say. I’ve noticed my speech has slowed down, as if I’m speaking English as a second language. This is because I mentally check every word before allowing myself to utter it. Is it a lie? Is it a boast? Is it a curse? Is it gossip? What about exaggeration? Does the Bible allow me to say “My friend Mark’s been working at Esquire since 1904?” (He’s been there a mere seventeen years). I censor about 20 percent of my sentences before they leave my mouth. The Bible’s language laws are rigorous.

  I’m poring over religious study books, desperately trying to get a handle on this topic and every other. My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it’ll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It’s like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.

  I still read the Bible itself, taking it with me wherever I go. That Bible salesman was right—I should have gotten that version of the Scriptures that’s camouflaged as a teen magazine. When I read my Bible on the subway, I can feel the hostility emanating from the secular commuters. They look at me with their lips taut and faces tense, like they expect me to tackle them at any moment and forcibly baptize them.

  In addition to the Bible, I also carry around a stapled printout of my rules, which I scan frequently. My original plan had been to pay equal attention to all the rules every day. This turned out to be impossible. That’s like trying to juggle seven-hundred-plus balls. The brain can’t handle it. I was too scattered.

  So my revised plan is this: I will still attempt to follow all the rules simultaneously. But on a given day, I’ll home in on a particular rule and devote much of my energy to that rule, while keeping the others in my peripheral vision.

  How to choose the right time to focus on a particular rule? It’s not a science. I’ve opted instead to go where the spirit takes me. I imagine a lot of factors will come into play: life’s curveballs, my whims, logistics, my day job (I write for Esquire magazine, which I know will force me to confront the lust rules soon enough). And variety. I want to alternate obscure with mainstream, physical with mental, hard with easy. I need variety. I don’t have the stamina to spend a month focused solely on the forty-five rules of idolatry.

  With the humble is wisdom.

  —PROVERBS 11:2

  Day 11. I’m going to take a bunch of biblically themed road trips this year, and today is my first: Amish country. It seems a good place to start. Not only are the Amish tied with the Hasidic Jews for the title of most easily spotted Bible followers, but they are also interesting in this sense: They strictly adhere to rules in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. For instance:

  Their famous facial hair is the result of the Old Testament’s ban on trimming the beard. (The Amish do, however, shave their moustaches, because the moustache was thought to have military associations.)

  They refuse to pose for or take photos, since it would violate the Old Testament’s Second Commandment: “You shall not make…any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath.” This is why, if you click on an Amish website, you’ll often see photos of the backs of their heads. (And yes, the Amish have websites; go ahead and chuckle if you must. To be fair, the Amish don’t run the sites themselves. It’s a third party promoting their woodworks and quilts.)

  Amish women wear bonnets in keeping with the New Testament’s 1 Corinthians 11:5, which states that women’s heads must be covered while praying.

  The Amish perform a foot-washing ritual in accordance with the New Testament’s John 13:14–15, which says, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example…”

  The Amish version of biblical living is combined with what’s called the Ordnung—the traditions that have built up since the Amish origins in sixteenth-century Switzerland. The Ordnung is what dictates the Amish dress code and their ban on electricity.

  Julie and I rent a car and drive down to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Julie may not be a huge fan of my project, but she figures she can at least take advantage of a road trip or two. Our destination is called Smucker’s Farm Guest House. It’s one of the few bed-and-breakfasts actually owned and operated by an Amish family. Most inns just offer some sort of vague proximity to Amish people. This is the real thing.

  The trip takes four hours. Incidentally, I’m proud to say that I had absolutely no urge to make a double entendre when we passed Intercourse, Pennsylvania, which I see as a moral victory.

  We pull into the driveway, and the first thing I lay eyes on is a woman in full Amish regalia—ankle-length blue dress and a white bonnet—wielding a gas-powered leaf blower. This isn’t an image I expected to see. She doesn’t have a video iPod, but still. It punctures my Amish stereotypes right up front.

  The woman—Anna—brings us to meet her father, Amos, the head of the household. Amos Smucker is tall, thin, and slope shouldered. He’s dressed exactly as you’d imagine: black suspenders, straw hat, pants pulled high above his waist. His snow-white hair is shaped in the traditional Amish style: a modified bowl cut that curves over the ears and then angles down, becoming just a bit longer in the back.

  I introduce myself. He nods, gives me a quiet “Hello,” and walks us to our room.

  Amos talks slowly and carefully, like he only has a few dozen sentences allotted for the weekend, and he doesn’t want to waste them at the start. I read later in the Amish book Rules of a Godly Life that you should “let your words be thoughtful, few, and true.” By adopting minimalism, Amos has mastered those speech laws I’m struggling with.

  I tell Amos that I’d love to talk to him about the Amish. He obliges. I wonder how sick he is of answering the same annoying questions from curious outsiders. At least I pledged to myself not to bring up Witness or that Randy Quaid movie about the one-armed Amish bowler.

  We sit in Amos’s kitchen—sparse, of course, with a wooden table and a three-ring binder that says “A Journal of By-gone Years: The Smuckers.”

  “When did your family come over?” I ask.

  “My ancestor Christian Smucker came over from Switzerland in the eighteenth century.”

  And yes, Amos is a distant cousin of the strawberry-jam Smuckers, thou
gh that branch is no longer Amish.

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “There were seventeen of us,” says Amos.

  “Seventeen?”

  He nods.

  “And where were you in the order?”

  “I was the baby,” Amos says. “Once my mother got me, she said, ‘I’m done. I got what I wanted.’”

  Did he just make a joke? I think so. Amos allows himself just the slightest, faintest wisp of a smile.

  I explain the premise of my book to Amos. He stares over my left shoulder in silence. No reaction. From my brief visit with the Amish, I got the feeling that they are not enamored of talking about theology, at least not with the English, at least not with me. Best stick to more practical topics.

  “Are you working now?”

  “I used to be a dairy farmer, but I don’t do so much anymore. I’m not retired. I’m just tired.”

  I think Amos just made another joke. You haven’t seen deadpan delivery till you’ve seen the Amish.

  “What’s your schedule?” I ask.

  “I go to sleep at eight-thirty or so, and wake up at four-thirty. I can’t sleep after five. I was a dairy farmer, and that’s the way my computer is programmed.”

  An interesting metaphor for a man who doesn’t use electricity, I think to myself.

  Amos drums his fingers on the table. He has amazing hands. Knotty, but somehow elegant, with thumbs that curve around like candy canes and practically brush up against his wrist.

  We sit silently.

  Finally, Julie asks if maybe he could show us the property. He nods. Our first stop is the garage. Amos owns three black buggies, all of them lined up against the wall, their red fluorescent triangles facing outward. His daughter Anna is polishing the middle one.

  The garage opens into the stables, where Amos keeps his horses. He has two of them—they’re beautiful and chocolate brown, and they trot over to greet Amos.