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

by A. J. Jacobs

  This biblical alter ego of mine is such a separate being, I’ve taken to calling him a different name: Jacob. It seemed the most natural choice; close but not identical. I’ve been observing this Jacob guy, studying him.

  And here’s what I’ve found: He, too, has a split personality. On the one hand, Jacob is much more moral than I am. He attempts to fulfill Leviticus 19:18—“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Which means he’s doing things like holding the elevator door for slow-moving passengers. Or giving a buck to the homeless guy outside the Museum of Natural History who says he’s seeking donations for the “United Negro Pizza Fund.”

  He pays attention to the hundreds of small, almost unnoticeable moral decisions we make every day. He turns off the lights when leaving the room. He refrains from gawking at odd-looking passersby—the four-hundred-pound man, the guy with the banana-colored pants, the woman who’s eight inches taller than her boyfriend—something that I, as a lifelong people watcher, would love to do. Jacob stares straight ahead like a Buckingham Palace guard.

  He’s not getting short-listed for the Nobel yet, but he’s a better man than my secular self.

  On the other hand, my alter ego Jacob is engaging in some deeply strange behavior. He says, “Maybe we could have lunch on the fourth day of the workweek,” since “Thursday” is forbidden. It comes from the Norse god Thor.

  He rubs a dab of olive oil in his hair each morning, as instructed by Ecclesiastes 9:8 (“let not oil be lacking on your head”), which leaves these unfortunate green stains on all my baseball hats.

  And he’s developed this byzantine method of paying our babysitter Des. The Bible says the “wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning,” (Leviticus 19:13) so Jacob gives her cash every night. But my secular self needs to pay her by weekly check so that she can properly file for taxes. Which means that I have to ask that she bring all the cash back at the end of the week and exchange it for a check. I’m not sure this is helping anyone. Des has already started trying to slip out at night without saying good-bye to me/Jacob.

  My alter ego’s behavior points to one of the biggest mysteries of the Bible. How can these ethically advanced rules and these bizarre decrees be found in the same book? And not just the same book. Sometimes the same page. The prohibition against mixing wool and linen comes right after the command to love your neighbor. It’s not like the Bible has a section called “And Now for Some Crazy Laws.” They’re all jumbled up like a chopped salad.

  Maybe all will become clear by the end of the year. Maybe.

  Month Two: October

  Three times a year you shall celebrate a pilgrim feast to me.

  —EXODUS 23:14 (NAB)

  Day 31, morning. I spend a half hour checking airfares to Israel. I need to go this year. I can’t devote twelve months to living biblically without making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the holy book itself.

  I’ve been once before. When I was fourteen, my parents wanted to take us to Israel and Egypt, so we signed up for a tour group whose members consisted of my family, a couple of dozen retired orthodontists, and an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old woman who had been led to believe this would be a singles tour, which it was, if you count the high percentage of widows and widowers.

  I don’t remember much about the tour. I remember the long bus rides, with the Israeli tour guide asking, “Does anyone want to stop at the smile room?” That was Israeli tour guide slang for the bathroom, since “everyone smiles when they walk out of the smile room.” I remember preferring the Egyptian portion of the trip; I’d always been fascinated by the pyramids and had some knowledge of the Nile culture, or had at least memorized the lyrics to Steve Martin’s “King Tut” song.

  But Israel itself made little impression at all on my secular mind. At the time, I was going through an ill-thought-out Marxist phase. Religion was the opium of the people. And not just that: I was sure the opium pushers—the rabbis, the bishops, the ministers—were in on the con and were only trying to pay for their Mercedes Benzes. Israel was the center of the corrupt system.

  By default, this trip has to be more meaningful. Plus, it will give me a chance to meet my ex-uncle Gil. Yes, as in meet him for the first time. Here’s the weird thing: He was married to my aunt for years, but I’ve never seen him face to face. The family considered him such an unstable character, such a fraud, that no one wanted him around at reunions or birthday parties. They didn’t see him as a harmless eccentric. He was dangerous. There were rumors of his Svengali-like, abusive techniques when he was a cult leader.

  The main strategy was to pretend that he didn’t exist. In her semimonthly family newsletter, my grandmother couldn’t even bring herself to type Gil’s name. She referred to him only as “He.” As in “He and Kate will be visiting in March,” which I always found an ironic echo of the Orthodox refusal to write the name God (usually written G-d.) The only time I remember my grandmother mentioning Gil was when she talked about a disturbing conversation she’d had with Kate. “She told me she’d be happy to stare into his eyes all day,” said my grandmother. “That’s not how a marriage should be. You should be side by side, facing the world, not looking into each other’s eyes all day.” So Gil has always been this mysterious, forbidden, slightly scary figure to me.

  Gil met Kate in 1982, and she became Orthodox soon after. I don’t remember much about her from her pre-Gil life. I remember her waist-length hair (now tucked under a headdress), her creepy UFO-expert boyfriend, and her gift of a whoopee cushion she brought back from France, which I guess was way more sophisticated than any whoopee cushion that we yokel Americans could make.

  I remember her giggling a lot. And she still does; Orthodox Judaism hasn’t erased her sense of humor. She has a great, loud, whooping laugh. But her passion nowadays is for two things: her four children and the Torah.

  It’s a tricky and guilt-inducing proposition, meeting Gil. The truth is, I’m rebelling against my family. No one wants me to meet him. Early on, my mom asked point blank: “You’re not going to talk to Gil, are you?” I didn’t answer.

  She thinks that if I meet Gil, it’ll give him some sort of legitimacy he doesn’t deserve. I don’t know about that. I don’t think I’m in the position to bestow legitimacy on anyone. Regardless, I can’t resist the chance to visit him. The man helped with the genesis of this quest. For better or worse, he could be a pivotal figure in my struggle to understand religion. At the end, I’ll beg my family’s forgiveness.

  Blow the trumpet at the new moon…

  —PSALMS 81:3

  Day 31, afternoon. The Bible commands me—or Jacob, or whoever I am—to blow a trumpet at the start of every month. (To be safe, I’m also blowing a trumpet at the start of every Hebrew month.)

  I find a ram’s horn at the Jewish community center gift shop. It’s a small shofar—thirty dollars will only get you so much—about three times the size of a kazoo and shaped like an elbow macaroni.

  There’s no doubt it’s from a ram, though. It smells like a barn that hasn’t been cleaned for days. I stand in my living room and blow. No sound. Just loudly exhaled air. These ram’s horns are surprisingly hard to play. I’m still working under the assumption that the Bible didn’t ban computers, so I spend half an hour on the internet picking up tips:

  Separate the lips as if you were making a raspberry.

  Keep your jaw in the position you would if you were spitting a watermelon seed.

  Wet your lips—

  —but not too much.

  If you do wet them too much, spittle is best removed from the shofar by a coffee brush or an aquarium brush.

  Put the shofar in the corner of your mouth, not in the center.

  I sip a glass of water, part my lips, jut out my jaw, and blow the shofar again. It sounds like a dying fax machine. But, I remind myself, I still have eleven more months.

  I did a little research, and, as I suspected, I’m not alone. There are a handful of twenty-first-century peop
le who also blow a trumpet to kick off each month. But they are admittedly on the religious fringe. Mainstream Judaism and Christianity have both discontinued the practice, along with the observance of hundreds of other obscure biblical rules. The reason?

  Christians believe that Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice. His crucifixion made animal sacrifice unnecessary. And not just animal sacrifice, but many of the ceremonial laws of the ancient Hebrews. This is why Christians can eat bacon and shave their beards with impunity. And why they don’t need to blow a trumpet to the new month.

  Most—but not all—Christians draw a distinction between “moral laws” and “ritual laws.” They still adhere to the Old Testament’s moral laws, such as the Ten Commandments (and, sometimes, the ban on homosexuality), but they scrap many of the ritual laws. Of course, there’s a good amount of debate in Christianity over which should be considered moral laws and which ritual. Is the Sabbath a moral law? Or ritual? What about the ban on tattoos? I read a long tirade by one Christian against so-called Christian tattoo parlors.

  There are dozens of rules that Jews no longer follow as well. The reason is different, though. According to Judaism, animal sacrifice can take place only at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. And when the temple was gone, so was the relevance of more than two hundred sacrifice-related rules. (Including blowing a trumpet to the new moon, which was originally done along with a sacrifice.) Plus, Americans are off the hook with regard to another forty-five laws that they believe apply only in the land of Israel—many of them dealing with agriculture.

  When I started this project, I vowed to try to follow all the Bible’s rules—ritual, moral, agricultural, and sacrificial—and see where it takes me. But, to use a food metaphor in honor of my adviser Pastor Richards, I think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.

  When a woman has a discharge of blood, which is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.

  —LEVITICUS 15:19

  Day 34. In case you were wondering, Julie got her period yesterday—which is bad news in two senses. First, it means that our attempt to be fruitful and multiply has failed yet again. Second, it ratchets up the biblical living to a whole new level of awkwardness.

  The Hebrew Bible discourages the faithful from touching a woman for the week after the start of her period. So far in my year, adhering to this rule has been only mildly uncomfortable, nothing worse. In fact, it’s got an upside: It dovetails quite nicely with my lifelong obsessive-compulsive disorder and germaphobia, so it’s turned out to be a brilliantly convenient excuse to avoid touching 51 percent of the human population.

  A female friend will come in for a cheek kiss, and I’ll dart my head out of the way like Oscar de la Hoya. A colleague will try to shake my hand, and I’ll step backward to safety.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to.”

  “Oh. Um. OK.”

  Usually that’s the end of it. Usually but not always. Consider this conversation I had with Julie’s Australian friend Rachel, whom we met in Central Park last week.

  “You’re not allowed to? What do you mean?”

  “Well, you might be…impure.”

  “What do you mean ‘impure’?”

  “You know. In your cycle.”

  I paused. She looked perplexed. I decided this was a good time to avoid eye contact and study the pavement.

  “Oh, you mean I might be menstruating? Don’t worry, I menstruated last week.”

  At which point she hugged me. No escaping it.

  Oddly, Rachel is not alone. A small but surprisingly vocal minority of Julie’s friends have volunteered detailed information about their biological cycles. The photo editor at Esquire took the considerate step of emailing me her schedule. Did I perhaps want an Excel chart as well, she wondered?

  I even managed to flatter this one woman I met at my sister-in-law’s party. When I explained to her why I couldn’t shake her hand, she told me, “Well, that’s the nicest compliment I’ve heard in a long time.” I looked at her again: gray hair, crow’s feet, sixtysomething—yes, probably long past needing to worry about unplanned pregnancies.

  Julie, however, is not flattered at all. She finds the whole ritual offensive. I’m not loving it either. It’s one thing to avoid handshakes during flu season. But to give up all physical contact with your wife for seven days a month? It’s actually quite exhausting, painful, and lonely. You have to be constantly on guard—no sex, of course, but also no hand holding, no shoulder tapping, no hair tousling, no good-night kissing. When I give her the apartment keys, I drop them into her hand from a safe height of six inches.

  “This is absurd,” she tells me, as she unlocks the door. “It’s like cooties from seventh grade. It’s theological cooties.”

  I tell Julie that I can’t pick and choose what I follow in the Bible. That’d negate the whole point of my experiment. If I’m trying to get into the mind-set of the ancient Israelites, I can’t ignore even the most inconvenient or obscure rule. I also point out that I didn’t send her to a red tent.

  She’s not amused. “I feel like a leper.”

  “Actually, leprosy in the Bible is a mistranslation. It’s more likely a generic name for skin disease. Some even claim it’s syphilis.”

  This is the wrong response. It’s a vestigial reflex from my days as an encyclopedia-reading know-it-all: Whenever I run out of things to say, I crowbar random facts into the argument.

  Julie walks out of the room. When she’s annoyed, she walks with heavy, stomping footsteps. I felt magnitude-five tremors throughout the apartment.

  Since I understand Julie’s objection and kind of agree with it, I figure it’d be good to get some historic and cultural context. I consult my spiritual advisory board and read up on the literature. As with all of the baffling Bible rules, there is a wealth of positive spin.

  First, if done properly, the no-touching ban isn’t bad for your marriage. Quite the opposite. Orthodox Jews still follow a version of the original menstruation laws, and many told me they enjoy the enforced sex hiatus. “It’s like we get to have honeymoon sex every month,” said an Orthodox woman I met one day in Central Park. “It’s like makeup sex. You only appreciate what you have when you don’t have it.”

  Second, avoiding your wife at this time of month is not misogynistic. It actually has to do with a reverence for life. When a woman has her period, it’s like a little death. A potential life has vanished. This is a way of paying respect, like sitting shivah.

  In fact, words like impurity and unclean are mistranslations. Some Orthodox Jews find such terms offensive. The Hebrew word is tumah, a state of spiritual impurity that doesn’t have the same negative connotations.

  (By the way, the history of impurity laws is fascinating but complex. Let me try to cram an hourlong talk I had with a rabbi into eight lines: The purity laws date from the Jerusalem temples. Back then, you had to be pure to make a sacrifice. When the Second Temple was destroyed, many of the purity laws fell out of use. Many, but not all. Jewish men still steer clear of their wives during menstruation. But they cite a different motivation: Touching might lead to sex, and sex during that time of the month—temple or no temple—is forbidden by another law, Leviticus 20:18. Also, to be extrasafe, the no-touching ban has been extended from a week to about twelve days. OK, finished.)

  None of this positive spin appeases Julie, especially since I’ve decided to abide by another law that makes the no-touching-impure-women rule seem like a breeze. It’s found in Leviticus 15:20: “everything upon which she lies during her impurity shall be unclean; everything also upon which she sits shall be unclean.” In other words, you shouldn’t lie on a bed where a menstruating woman has lain, and you can’t sit on a chair where she has sat.

  It’s a rule that no one follows to the letter anymore. But, again, I want the ultimate ancient-Israelite experience. And it can’t hurt to be pur
e, right?

  As for not lying on unclean beds, I’m off the hook. Julie and I don’t share a bed. Apparently, when I sleep, I thrash around like a beached marlin, so Julie has opted for two twin beds pushed together, a disturbing echo of my parents and early sixties sitcoms.

  The no-sitting-on-impure-seats presents more of a challenge. I came home this afternoon and was about to plop down on my official seat, the gray pleather armchair in our living room.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” says Julie.

  “Why?”

  “It’s unclean. I sat on it.” She doesn’t even look up from her TiVo’d episode of Lost.

  OK. Fine. Point taken. She still doesn’t appreciate these impurity laws. I move to another chair, a black plastic one.

  “Sat in that one, too,” says Julie. “And the ones in the kitchen. And the couch in the office.”

  In preparation for my homecoming, she sat in every chair in the apartment, which I found annoying but also impressive. It seemed in the biblical tradition of enterprising women—like Judith, who seduced the evil general Holofernes, only to behead him when he was drunk.

  I finally settle on Jasper’s six-inch-high wooden bench, which she had overlooked, where I tap out emails on my PowerBook with my knees up to my chin.

  The next day I do a web search and find a thirty-dollar solution to the chair problem: the Handy Seat. This is an aluminum cane that unfolds into a three-legged miniature chair. It’s marketed to the elderly, as well as “individuals who suffer from asthma, arthritis, hip or leg surgery, fibromyalgia, back injury,” and various other ailments.

  My Handy Seat arrives a few days later, and man, do I adore it. I’ve started bringing it everywhere. First, it’s a cane, which is sort of like a staff, which feels very biblical to me. Plus, if you think about it, every subway seat, every bus seat, every restaurant seat—almost certainly impure. The Handy Seat is the foolproof solution. It’s not overly comfortable (the plastic part for sitting is only about the size of a Frisbee, and I’ve got minor back pain from the hunching posture it causes). And there’s the inevitable problem of raised eyebrows from passersby and scolding from lobby security guys. (“What are you doing?” asked the guard at the Time Warner Center. “Just sitting, waiting for my friend.” “Well, you can’t sit here. Get up.”) But the Handy Seat is my little island of cleanliness. There’s something safe and comforting about it.