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

by A. J. Jacobs

  On this journey, I plan to be mindful of the oral law. But I’m not going to follow it exclusively. I feel I have to try to puzzle out for myself what the Bible means, even if it means I take some wrong turns.

  All this makes me realize: In a sense, my project is steeped in Judaism, since I’m spending a lot of time on the Hebrew Scriptures. But in some ways, it’s actually more influenced by the Protestant idea that you can interpret the Bible yourself, without mediation. Sola scriptura, as it’s called.

  Martin Luther advocated sola scriptura in reaction to the Catholic Church. At the risk of muddying matters, Catholicism is somewhere between Judaism and Protestantism in terms of biblical interpretation. Like Judaism, there’s a middle step between you and the Bible—namely the church doctrine. But the Catholic church’s mandates are generally slightly less elaborate and complex than those of the rabbis.

  In some ways, going literal is turning out to be easier than rabbinic Judaism. Do I need to wear a yarmulke? No, the Bible doesn’t mandate it. That came from the rabbis. But in some ways, it’s infinitely harder. I’m trying to follow the word. When the Bible says, “an eye for an eye,” I don’t want to soften it to the rabbinically approved “some money for an eye.” When it says smash idols, I want to smash idols. Plus, I’m already feeling guilty—which is how I know I’m actually Jewish. I feel like I’m disappointing my forefathers. I imagine my distant ancestor the Vilna Gaon—a famous rabbi in Eastern Europe—shaking his head somewhere, sighing, emitting an Oy-yi-yi-yi-yi.

  Give strong drink to him who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress.

  —PROVERBS 31:6

  Day 44, afternoon. My Esquire colleague David broke up with his girlfriend. He has sciatica—which I had always thought was restricted to people who drive Ford Crown Victorias and get half-off movie tickets. Also, he wrote a very funny movie script about elaborate Christmas displays—and then had someone sell the exact same idea two days before he sent it out.

  Next time I’m at Esquire, I stop by his office with a bottle of Kendall-Jackson red wine.

  “Here,” I say, handing it to him over his desk.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s because you’re depressed. The Bible says to bring wine to the heavy of heart.”

  “The Bible says that?”

  “Yes. It also says that you shouldn’t sing to people with a heavy heart. That’d be like rubbing vinegar in the wound.”

  “So you’re not going to sing to me?”

  “No.”

  David seems grateful for the wine, and no doubt the lack of singing as well. I love it when the Bible gives Emily Post–like tips that are both wise and easy to follow.

  Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

  —EXODUS 20:8

  Day 45. It’s the seventh Sabbath of my biblical year. Well, actually, it’s the day after the seventh Sabbath. I couldn’t type this entry on the Sabbath itself because the Bible tells me not to work. (A friend of mine said that even observing the Sabbath might be breaking the Sabbath, since my job is to follow the Bible. That gave me a two-hour headache.)

  Before my biblical year, I was among the biggest Sabbath violators in America. I’m a workaholic. It’s a trait I got from my father, who scribbles away on his law books without ceasing—on the beach, on the train, while “watching” old Katharine Hepburn movies on DVD (which means an occasional glance at the screen to make sure the picture is still moving). If the Apocalypse comes, there’s no doubt he’d work right on through, looking up to take note of the rising rivers of blood before returning to his case study. I’d probably do the same.

  We’d have a lot of company. In the post-BlackBerry age, is there really a boundary between the weekday and the weekend, between work hours and overtime? We work on Saturday, the Jewish Shabbat. We work on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. We put in more hours than the God of Genesis himself.

  It wasn’t always so in America. As New York Times writer Judith Shulevitz points out, the Puritans left England in large part for the freedom to follow the fourth commandment. The Puritans took the Sabbath seriously: no sports, no dancing, no smoking, no visiting. You must attend church, but the Puritans “punished anyone who got there with unseemly haste or on too showy a horse.” The Sabbath in America survived even after the Puritans faded away. As recently as eighty years ago, writes Shulevitz, “football was considered too vulgar to be played on Sunday.”

  You can see traces of the Puritan influence today—just try buying liquor on Sunday morning in Manhattan. And the hardcore Sabbath is making a comeback in some evangelical circles. The Florida-based mega-pastor D. James Kennedy tells his parishioners not to eat at a restaurant on Sunday, because that’s encouraging waiters to work, thus breaking God’s law.

  The strictest Sabbath keepers today are probably the Orthodox Jews. In postbiblical times, the rabbis wrote down a complex list of forbidden behavior. It’s got thirty-nine types of work, including cooking, combing, and washing. You can’t plant, so gardening is off-limits. You can’t tear anything, so toilet paper must be pre-ripped earlier in the week. You can’t make words, so Scrabble is often considered off-limits (though at least one rabbi allows Deluxe Scrabble, since the squares have ridges, which provides enough separation between letters so that they don’t actually form words).

  I got a firsthand taste of the Orthodox Shabbat when my aunt Kate was visiting my parents’ house. Kate’s very cute, very observant thirteen-year-old daughter, Rivka, was over. She’d eaten part of an ice cream sundae and wanted to store it in the freezer for later. But it was Friday, and sundown was coming fast. (The Jewish Sabbath lasts from before sundown Friday to after sundown Saturday.)

  She couldn’t open the freezer after sundown because that would turn on a freezer light, which was illegal.

  “Can you unscrew the freezer lightbulb?” she asked my mom.

  My mom tried to unscrew it, but couldn’t reach the bulb without removing every last Eggo and Ben & Jerry’s from the freezer drawer.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said my mom. “I’ll open the freezer for you.”

  “You can’t. You’re Jewish,” said Rivka.

  “Then I’ll ask Joelle to do it.” (Joelle is my Catholic great-aunt.)

  “You can’t ask her. She just has to volunteer to do it.”

  At which point, my mom gave up. I’m guessing that the poor kosher sundae is still in there today.

  At first glance, the Sabbath and all of its rules seemed outlandish. And yet I’ve opted to reserve judgment till I experience the Sabbath myself.

  Or at least the explicitly biblical version of the Sabbath. Unlike the rabbis, the Bible itself gives few detailed instructions on how exactly to refrain from work. And the ones it does give apply only to farmers and reality-show contestants: no kindling of fire, no gathering sticks, no plowing or harvesting.

  So I have to figure this one out myself. Since my work is writing, I decide I need to abstain from writing, of course. But also researching, phoning colleagues, and scouting the newspaper for ideas. The thing is, going cold turkey terrifies me. I want to wade into this ocean cautiously, like a Sarasota retiree.

  The first week, I told myself: no checking of email. I lasted all of an hour, after which I told myself, well, I won’t open the emails themselves. I’ll just scan the subject headers. That doesn’t count as working. So I clicked on the mail. Hmm. An email from my mom. The Bible does say to respect your parents. And maybe it’s urgent. Plus, I have another fifty-one Sabbaths to get it right. I clicked on it. It’s a joke about five blondes and a blind man in a bar.

  Week number two, I tried it again. I shall open no email from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. I made it past Friday night, but then broke down on Saturday morning and stole a peek again. Well, I told myself, I’ve still got fifty Sabbaths left. Unfortunately, I didn’t improve with Sabbaths three to six.

  This week I vowed to make it all the way. I felt optimistic. At 6:00 p.m. on Friday
night, the sun officially dipped below the New York horizon. I snapped shut my computer, shoved all my books in the corner, silenced the electronic cowbell on my cell phone that I’ve been meaning to change anyway—and did a little Berkowitz-like fist pump. Something clicked in my brain. It was a school’s-out-for-summer feeling. A wave of relief and freedom. No matter how much I want to, I cannot work. I have no choice.

  It was a beautiful moment. And short lived. An hour later, my brain clicked back, and I started to suffer pangs of withdrawal every time I walked past my idle PowerBook. What emails are piling up in my inbox? What if the editor of The New Yorker sent me a surprise job offer? On Saturday at noon, I broke down. I checked. Who’s going to know?

  I was too embarrassed to tell Julie. Julie loves that I’m trying to break the seven-day work cycle—the Sabbath is her favorite part of my experiment. So I keep my failure a secret.

  Worse, I then use the Sabbath to weasel out of household tasks.

  “Can you put the papers in the recycling bin?”

  “I really shouldn’t. I’m not allowed to carry a burden outside of my house.”

  As she took out the papers herself, I could hear her footsteps thump down the hallway corridor.

  You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him…

  —EXODUS 22:21

  Day 46. Tonight I invited a Jehovah’s Witness into my home. I realize that this fact already puts me in an extreme minority.

  And, mind you, I didn’t just idly answer the door and let a Jehovah’s Witness inside. I aggressively pursued the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I phoned the headquarters and requested that a Jehovah’s Witness be sent to my apartment. After three calls and not a little confusion on their part—it’s not a common inquiry—I finally got my wish.

  Yes, I’m aware that it doesn’t make much sense. It’s like volunteering for jury duty or paying to see a Vin Diesel movie.

  OK, enough! The poor Jehovah’s Witnesses. Their zeal for ringing doorbells have made them one of America’s favorite religious punch lines. So I promise: No more cheap Jehovah’s Witness jokes.

  But I do want to know more about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and what they really stand for. Because they are perhaps the fastest-growing biblical literalists in the world. Their current membership stands at more than 6.6 million, with about 300,000 new converts a year. They’re also interesting to me because they are usually classified as Christian, but, like the Amish, they lean heavily on the Hebrew Scriptures.

  My Jehovah’s Witness is named Michael, and he arrives right on the dot, at 7:30 p.m. He wears a brown suit, brown shoes, brown tie, and carries a brown leather case holding a Bible and a pamphlet. He looks somewhat like the actor Gary Busey, if Gary Busey had his hair parted in the middle.

  Michael is warm and likeable. He has a deep voice, but it is more soothing than booming, more shrink than football coach.

  And he is grateful. So grateful it’s almost heartbreaking. He thanks me for having him over. “There are so many misconceptions about Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’m just so glad you’re talking to me to find out the truth.”

  He sits on the living room couch, leaning forward, his hands in the “fish-was-this-big” posture. “People say ours is a primitive Christianity—and we take that as a compliment.” The Witnesses believe they’re getting back to the original meaning of the Bible—the booklet Michael gives me is called “What Does the Bible Really Teach?”

  Michael, who works in computers at the massive Jehovah’s Witness headquarters in Brooklyn, gives me a crash course in his faith. Here, some of the highlights of the belief (vastly oversimplified, of course):

  God should be called Jehovah, because that’s what the Bible calls him. “You can call a person ‘man,’ or you can call him by his name, ‘Bob.’ God has a name: ‘Jehovah.’”

  Humans should take literally Jesus’s pacifist words. “You won’t find any Jehovah’s Witnesses in Iraq,” Michael says. “Jesus said, ‘He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.’”

  They don’t believe in the Trinity. Jesus is not God, but instead God’s first creation. (This belief is why they are sometimes seen as belonging outside of Christianity.)

  Armageddon is coming soon—and believers will be resurrected and live in paradise. But most righteous people won’t live in heaven. Almost everyone will live in a paradise here on earth. Heaven will be reserved for 144,000 pious souls who will reign with Jehovah as divine administrators.

  The Witnesses don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter, as neither holiday is mentioned in the Bible. Birthdays are also out: The only two birthdays celebrated in the Bible were those of evil people—one a Pharaoh and one a pro-Roman Jewish king. Michael’s fine with the ban, especially now. “As I get older, I don’t want to be reminded of my birthday.”

  There is no hell. The Witnesses believe hell is a mistranslation of Gehenna, which was an ancient garbage dump. They say that nonbelievers simply die at Armageddon, rather than being thrown into an inferno. “How can you have a kind and loving God who also roasts people?” he asks.

  I am surprised by the Jehovah’s Witness theology, especially this last point. I had always heard that they were a fire-and-brimstone sect, but here’s Michael telling me they reject the notion of hell. The belief is probably heretical by mainstream standards, but it has a gentleness to it.

  It has been an hour and a half, and Michael is glancing at his watch every few minutes now.

  “You just tell me when you want me to go,” says Michael. “I’m from the Midwest, so I’m conscious of overstaying my welcome.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I say. It’s true. I could keep going for hours. I doubt Michael will convert me, but I love discussing the Bible. Can’t get enough of it.

  I ask him what’s the most controversial part of his faith.

  “The blood transfusion issue,” he says. “People think we’re kooks. But we absolutely use the medical system.” (Was this a subtle dig at the Christian Scientists, I wondered?) “We just don’t take blood transfusions.”

  The reason is the literal translation of several verses, among them Acts 15:29, Genesis 9:4, and Leviticus 7:26—the last of which reads, “Ye shall eat no manner of blood” (KJV).

  The Witnesses make an unusual argument here. They say that the word eat should really be translated as “consume,” and that transfusion qualifies as consumption.

  As Michael points out, this is seriously controversial. Critics say that the ban has caused numerous deaths, and the Witnesses have been the subject of several lawsuits. In recent years, the church elders have scaled back a bit. Now, elements of blood—such as hemoglobin—can be transfused. But still, the ban on transfusing whole blood remains.

  To me, it boils down to this question: Should you obey the Bible’s rules even if doing so endangers your life? I’ve looked in the Bible to see what guidance it gives. As I suspected, there’s no clear-cut yes or no.

  On the one hand, the Bible is filled with martyrs and near-martyrs to their faith. In the Book of Daniel, the evil King Nebuchadnezzar commands three Hebrews to bow down before a golden idol or else get thrown in a fire. The men refuse to bow. Nebuchadnezzar stokes the fire—making it seven times hotter—and tosses the rebels in. But God protects his faithful, and they emerge unscorched.

  On the other hand, there are plenty of times when life takes precedence over obeying rules. Jesus lashes out at the Pharisees who criticize his followers for gathering grain on the Sabbath. Likewise, in modern Judaism, life trumps all. Even the most kosher rabbi would allow his followers to get pigs’ valves put in their hearts if necessary (despite a misleading Grey’s Anatomy plotline to the contrary).

  As you might have guessed, I’d make a horrible Jehovah’s Witness. Even in my biblical year, if I needed a blood transfusion, I’d be rolling up my sleeve before the doctor finished his sentence. I’m just not faithful/ brave/foolhardy enough to do otherwise. The Bible, in fact, has made me more reverent of life.

  Finally, at ten-thirty�
��three hours after he arrived—Michael says politely that he should let me get to sleep. I’m about to say no, I could keep going, when his Palm Treo rings. It’s his wife.

  “Yes, we’re just finishing up here. I’m about to leave.”

  Michael stands up to shake my hand.

  And then it hits me: I have just done something few human beings have ever achieved. I have out-Bible-talked a Jehovah’s Witness.

  You shall keep the feast of booths seven days…

  —DEUTERONOMY 16:13

  Day 47. The Bible gives explicit instructions on how to build Noah’s ark—300 by 50 by 30 cubits, with a roof and three decks of gopher wood. Later there’s an impressive eight pages on how to construct the Tabernacle, the tent where the Ten Commandments were stored, right on down to its blue and purple curtains.

  Luckily, I’m exempt from both these projects. They were one time only.

  But the Bible does command me to build something else: a hut. Once a year, we’re supposed to build a hut and dwell in it for a week so that we may be reminded of the huts used by the ancient Hebrews when they wandered the desert for forty years. It’s a major biblical holiday called the Feast of Ingathering—or Sukkoth—and is still practiced by religious Jews. It starts today. (October, incidentally, is a huge month for biblical holidays. I’ve also observed Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah—but let me return to those later.)

  Frankly, the idea of building a large three-dimensional structure gives me a stomachache. I’m no handyman. Put it this way: When I watch Bob the Builder with Jasper, I always learn something new (oh, so that’s what a strut is).

  I try to console myself that the hut will be a nice change from all the negative commands, the “thou shalt nots.” Here, a clear “thou shalt.” So I dive in and tackle the first issue: Where to put up my hut? The roof seems logical. I call our building’s manager and explain my plan.

  “I can’t let that happen,” he says. “Liability issues.”

  “What about the courtyard?”