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

by A. J. Jacobs

  Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

  —MARK 12:17

  Day 279. I’ve been dropping in on another evangelical Bible study class—a straight one. They meet on Tuesday nights in the back room of the American Bible Society near Columbus Circle.

  The dozen or so other members have been very welcoming of me, though a little perplexed at the same time, since I look more Jewish than your average diamond dealer on 47th Street. I’m glad they let me listen as we drill deep on a different passage from the Gospel of Mark each week. It’s always humbling. I can keep up with them on the Old Testament—I can quote from Deuteronomy and Proverbs—but I’m still a third-string minor leaguer when it comes to the New Testament.

  Anyway, I bring this up because last week at Bible study, the coleader—a tall, precise, white-haired man named Kevin—was talking about how he tries to be a good and law-abiding person.

  He told us that he was recently driving from New York to Ohio for business, and he had a battle with himself. He’d keep gunning his car up to sixty-five, then he’d feel guilty for breaking the law and slow back down to fifty-five.

  “I said to myself, ‘Do I really need to speed?’” he said. “‘What’s it going to save me? An hour? Is it worth it in the long run to break the law?’”

  There is scriptural justification for strict observance of civil law, speed limits, and otherwise. You can see it in one of Peter’s letters to his followers in the New Testament, where he tells them to obey the emperor: “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him” (1 Peter 2:13–14).

  When I ask the pastor out to pasture Elton Richards about whether to obey every human institution, he cautions me: You can find the opposing idea in the New Testament as well. There’s a story about Peter and the apostles preaching God’s word, and they are told by the authorities to shut up. They do not. They say, in effect, “We answer to a higher authority.”

  Marcus Borg, author of Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, says the two themes run throughout the Bible. Call them the status-quo motif and liberation motif. Status-quo sections tell us to support our earthly leaders. God appointed our leaders, so we shouldn’t question them—or even speak ill of them (“You shall not…curse a ruler of your people,” Exodus 22:28). The liberation parts encourage God’s people to throw off the yoke of oppression and flee the Pharaoh or his modern-day equivalents. They say that God is with the people, not the rulers.

  So which to choose? Well, in the case of traffic laws, Bible study leader Kevin has got a point. I’m not doing any noble Gandhi-like civil disobedience by going seventy in a school zone. I’m just trying to get home faster to take a nap. This month I have pledged to try to really follow New York’s street laws. To the letter. This has changed my life in a more dramatic way than I could have imagined. Just try not to jaywalk in Manhattan. It’s almost impossible. I wait on the corner, usually alone, or, if I’m lucky, with a German tourist couple and a class of first-graders on a field trip to the aquarium. The rest of New York pedestrians see the traffic lights as helpful suggestions and nothing more.

  I won’t pretend it’s fun. It’s a pain in the butt. It takes me about 30 percent longer to walk anywhere. And it’s another source of stupid—but increasingly frequent—arguments with my wife. Yesterday we got out of a cab in the middle of the block, and I refused to cross the street there. I walked to the end of the block, waited for the light to change, marched over the zebra crossing, then walked back up the other side. Conveniently, it was raining. Julie was waiting for me under an awning.

  “Hope you had a nice walk,” she said, her voice more tired than angry.

  Driving is just as bad. Until I started to pay attention, I didn’t even know speed limits existed in New York. I figured the rule was: Gun your car to get to the next light as fast as possible, then jerk to a stop. Then repeat. Or, more likely, sit in traffic and go 5 mph. But if you look hard enough, you can find them. Actual speed limit signs—30 mph on most avenues. So whenever we rent a car to visit Julie’s brother in New Jersey, I’ve made sure to cruise at a nice, smooth 25 mph down Columbus Avenue.

  When we get to the highway, things get more complicated. Often, I’m the only one putt-putting along at fifty-five, certainly the only one without a “World’s Best Grandpa” bumper sticker. I should probably have my hazards on. Cars whiz by me. They honk. They swerve. The drivers look at me like I’m the lone Red Sox fan at a Yankees game. The first time I drove on the highway, I couldn’t stop laughing—I’m not sure out of nervousness or out of the absurdity of it or both.

  So, in general, the whole experience has been a pain. But there are two upsides.

  1. I’ve come to see obeying traffic laws as an urban version of the Sabbath. It’s an enforced pause. When I stand alone on the corner, I try to spend the time appreciating the little things New York has to offer. Look at that: The street signs have changed from yellow and black to a much more pleasant green and white. When did that happen? Or else I watch the FedEx truck drive by and notice the secret white arrow embedded in its logo (it’s between the F and the E).

  2. I have freedom from worry. No one I know has ever been arrested for jaywalking. But whenever I violated the Don’t Walk sign, there was always a tiny, faint pang from knowing that I was doing something wrong. I no longer have that. I feel in control. It’s that same feeling of cleanliness, of relief, that I get when I actually fold all the sweaters in my closet or clean out all the emails in my in-box.

  …Not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God.

  —1 THESSALONIANS 4:5

  Day 286. Julie is seven months pregnant with the twins, and wildly uncomfortable. She can hardly move. She gets out of breath opening the refrigerator door. When I asked her a couple of weeks ago if she wanted to be intimate, she said the following: “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less.”

  No sugarcoating there.

  Speaking of sex, I think I dismissed the whole lust issue too glibly. I found a way to rationalize it. I told myself, well, the Hebrew Bible has prosex parts, so I don’t have to bother with all that modesty business.

  I took the easy way out. The truth is, there are plenty of sections of the Bible that do encourage restraint of the sex drive, sometimes even abstinence. Jesus says not to even think about other women aside from your wife: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–8).

  And the Apostle Paul implies that celibacy is the ideal; marriage is a second-best solution, a concession to our urges. As he says in Galatians 5:24: “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” So I decide that I should try to be ascetic for my final few weeks, and, as Paul says, put to death my earthly nature.

  My previous strategy of censorship didn’t work. We saw that with the CleanFlicks fiasco. It was too passive. I have to attack lust head-on. I have to change my way of thinking about sex. So after much reading, I’ve developed four strategies.

  Last night I had the chance to road test all four. I went to a fashion show that Yossi had invited me to. He said the designer is an Orthodox Jew who grew up in Brooklyn, and I figured, Orthodox fashion? Sounds pretty tame. Lots of bulky, shapeless, earth-toned dresses. Perhaps a scandalous glimpse of exposed ankle. I could handle that.

  I know I am going to be tempted from the moment I arrive. The event is held in Chelsea at the Frying Pan, a rusty boat docked off 23rd Street. The crowd is thick, packing both sides of the catwalk. Yes, there is a sprinkling of Orthodox Jews, but mostly it is gorgeous twentysomething fashion types with back tattoos and bare shoulders/midriffs/thighs. (There is also a man in a pink suit, pink shoes, and pink bowler hat, and on said bowler hat, a tiny billboar
d—about the size of a license plate—with a functioning electronic text scrawl. This did not make me lustful, but I thought you should know.)

  I start out with strategy number one. Here you think of the woman in question as out of your league. You remember this advice from the medieval rabbi way back in the first month? You have to think of yourself as a peasant and her as a princess. She’s so beyond your grasp, you can admire her aesthetically but not lustfully.

  I try this out within the first five minutes. When Yossi and I take our place, we notice a woman with a small leopard-skin skirt, small bustier, and very large cleavage.

  “You don’t see that too much in Crown Heights,” says Yossi.

  Interestingly, this strategy has gotten much easier for me with my current appearance. A year ago I might have deluded myself that I had a shot at Leopard-skin Bustier Woman. Nowadays, not so much.

  Strategy two: Think of the woman as if she were your mother.

  This is another tip from the medieval rabbi. So I do it. I think of Leopard-skin Bustier Woman as my mom, and I feel revulsed. I feel like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange undergoing the Ludovico technique. This is more effective than strategy number one, and also more disturbing.

  Strategy three: Recite Bible passages to yourself.

  After a few minutes, the fashion show itself starts, and the temptations get worse. The models aren’t hidden behind modest muumuus. They stomp down the runway with their exaggerated hip swivel, wearing alarmingly skimpy outfits that look like kimonos during a fabric shortage. One dark-haired model has no shirt or blouse whatsoever. The only thing around her chest is what appears to be an extralarge rubber band.

  Here I try strategy number three. This one I picked up from a book called When Good Men Are Tempted, a guide to controlling your lust, by an evangelical Christian named Bill Perkins. He suggests you recite Bible passages: “I’ve found that memorizing large sections of the Bible gives me a safe mental focus when I’m tempted. By the time I recite a paragraph or two to myself, my spirit is strengthened, and my mind is cleared.”

  So I do that. I mouth to myself one of the verses he suggested. It worked, in a way. My brain was so busy with its recital project, it didn’t have time to focus on the rubber band. The meaning of the passage is almost beside the point. I could have probably recited the lyrics to The Mikado and gotten a similar benefit. It’s all about keeping your mind distracted.

  The show ends, and I tell Yossi I should probably go. He says, “You sure you don’t want to just hang around for a few minutes?”

  “Well, just a few minutes.”

  We bump into a friend of Yossi’s. She is blond, Israeli, cute, and very drunk.

  “She has a weird fetish,” Yossi whispers to me. “She likes to fondle payot.”

  As in the side locks? Yossi nods.

  Oh, man. Yossi introduces me to her.

  “I’m very drunk,” she says.

  I smile noncommittally.

  Was she checking out my side locks? I think so.

  Here, I try out strategy number four: Do not objectify. This one I got from downloading an excellent sermon about lust by a Unitarian minister. The minister suggested that you can battle your urge to objectify women by focusing on them as a complete person. So I look at Fetish Girl and think about everything but her body: her Israeli childhood, what might be her favorite novel, how many cousins she has, whether she owns a PC or a Mac.

  But she won’t stop looking at my payot. This isn’t working. In a panic, I switch to the less evolved but more efficient method: Think of her as your mom. I feel nauseated. Victory.

  I’ve also noticed a strange phenomenon. I figured it’d get more and more difficult to suppress my sexuality. I figured it’d be like water building up behind a dam. But quite the opposite: it’s more like my sex drive has evaporated. I’m sure it’ll come roaring back like a dragon—to use the metaphor in my book When Good Men Are Tempted. But for now, it’s pleasantly tranquilized.

  And it makes me feel spiritually spotless. It makes me realize I have a hidden Puritan streak. On some level, I do consider sex dirty, or else why would I feel so buoyant when I’ve stamped it out? There’s something lovely about putting your libido in storage.

  And there’s another advantage: The thousands of watts of energy devoted to sex are suddenly free for other pursuits. Sublimation is real. I’ve never been so productive as I have been in these past weeks. I can crank out two thousand Esquire words a day on this no-sex diet.

  “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?”

  —MATTHEW 18:21

  Day 287. Tonight, at nine-fifteen, Julie leaves our bedroom door open. I have repeatedly asked her not to do this. I can’t sleep unless the room is Reykjavik-level cold, so I always shut the door at seven and flip the air conditioner on high. Julie, who could sleep anywhere and anytime, always forgets, leaves the door open, and lets my precious cool air slip out.

  I snap at her. “Please shut the door!”

  Huh. That came out a little too sharply. To soften things, I throw in a biblical literalism joke. “I forgive you this time. But if you do it another four hundred eighty-nine times, I won’t forgive you.”

  Julie shuts the door without asking me to explain my wryly cryptic statement. So let me do it here.

  I was referring to a passage in Matthew 18: “Then Peter came up and said to him, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.’”

  In other words 490 times.

  When I first made my list of biblical rules, this was actually part of my plan. I’d take everything literally, even those sentences that were clearly metaphorical. I would forgive someone 490 times, despite the fact that Jesus almost surely meant you should forgive an infinite number of times.

  I revised that plan for a couple of reasons. First, it would involve chopping off various parts of my body (see below), which I was reluctant to do. Second, it soon became clear that I could make my point—that biblical literalism is necessarily a selective enterprise—without intentionally warping the meaning of the Bible.

  But here is a sample of the even more bizarre life I could have led:

  I could have plucked out my eye, since Jesus says, “And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell” (Mark 9:47). This is generally interpreted by Christian leaders to mean that you should get rid of those things in your life that cause you to sin. “If you are addicted to internet pornography, you should consider getting rid of your computer,” says Dr. Campolo. Though as with most passages, there have been people who have taken it at its word. A psychologist of religion named Wayne Oates writes of mental patients who attempted to pluck out their eyes in literal compliance with Jesus’s words.

  I could hate my parents, since Jesus says, “If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Here the idea is that given the difficult choice between God and your family, you should choose God—not that Jesus condoned parent hating.

  I could avoid uttering the word good for the rest of my year, in literal adherence to this passage from Luke 18:18–19: “And a ruler asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.’”

  This approach reminds me of one of my dad’s wacky practical jokes: He’ll start pouring a glass of water for one of my friends and tell the unsuspecting chump “just say when.” The chump will say “Stop,” and my dad will keep pouring. The chump will say “That’s enough!” and my dad will keep pouring. My dad will keep pouring till the water spills over the edge of the glass and splashes on to the table. Then my dad will look at him in faux bewilderment and say: �
�You never said ‘when.’” A classic.

  And here’s the amazing thing: Those who overliteralize the words of God get mocked in the Bible itself. I learned this while reading a book called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, who refers to the following passage in the Gospel of John:

  In reply Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

  “How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus [a Pharisee] asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” (John 3:3–4, NIV).

  Nicodemus is like a sitcom dunderhead here. Born again? How is that possible? How can an adult squeeze back into his mother’s uterus? He can’t see that Jesus’s words were figurative and poetic, and he becomes the butt of a joke.

  “The truth will make you free.”

  —JOHN 8:32

  Day 290. Ever since my lying spree on the Falwell trip, I’ve recommitted myself to extreme honesty. In response, Julie has come up with a way to make my honesty more palatable. She’s started to ask me a singularly terrifying question: What are you thinking about? We’ll be walking to the playground, and she’ll spring it on me:

  “Hey. What are you thinking about?”

  I can’t just respond “nothing much.” I have to tell the truth, the unvarnished truth.

  “I’m thinking about that rude guy at the Judaica store on Broadway, and how I should have told him, ‘You just became a villain in my book.’”

  “Sounds like vengeance. Isn’t that biblically forbidden?”

  Julie loves her new trick. It’s as if she’s found a peephole into my soul and can discover who she’s really married to, no deceptions. Or, as she puts it, “I feel like I’ve picked up a chance card in Monopoly.”

  We’ll be unpacking groceries, and suddenly I’ll hear: “What are you thinking about?”