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

by A. J. Jacobs

  Jews have also obeyed this commandment on and off. Orthodox Jews still won’t make a sculpture of a human. Some Jews of fourteenth-century Germany wouldn’t draw people, though they did find my favorite loophole: They illustrated their texts with bird-headed humans. You see, the commandment forbids the likeness of anything in heaven or earth—and, technically, bird-headed humans don’t exist in heaven or earth. Ingenious, no?

  My vacation from iconography has been surprising, even enlightening. Despite the inconvenience, I do like image avoidance.

  First, it suits my job. Images are taking over, and writers are a dying breed. The Norman Mailers of today are reduced to writing pun-filled captions for paparazzi photos. Blogs—which were threatening enough to professional writers—are being replaced by video blogs. We writers need to embrace the Second Commandment as our rallying cry for the importance of words. In a literally biblical world, all publications would look like the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Or the way it used to look, anyway.

  Second, I think there’s something to the idea that the divine dwells more easily in text than in images. Text allows for more abstract thought, more of a separation between you and the physical world, more room for you and God to meet in the middle. I find it hard enough to conceive of an infinite being. Imagine if those original scrolls came in the form of a graphic novel with pictures of the Lord? I’d never come close to communing with the divine.

  The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I’d like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we’re missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they’d look gawky and gangly on TV.

  Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty.

  —PROVERBS 20:13

  Day 77. The other day, my grandfather asked me, “Do you sleep with the beard under the covers or over the covers?” Now that I’m aware of it, I can’t stop thinking about it. I switch positions every few minutes.

  It’s just one of the reasons I’m having trouble sleeping. The problem is, I’m downloading so much spiritual information during the days that I spend my nights awake in bed trying to process it. (Incidentally, the author of Proverbs would be fine with my lack of sleep; he considers sleep a sign of laziness that will lead to poverty.)

  As I lie in bed tonight, I think about Answers in Genesis, which just sent me another colorful brochure. Maybe I let myself off the creationism hook too easily. As unlikely as the six-day scenario may be, shouldn’t I at least give it the benefit of doubt?

  So I do an experiment. I try to put myself into the mind of my biblical alter ego Jacob. I convince myself that the earth was formed a handful of generations ago. I can’t 100 percent believe, but for a few minutes, I almost believe it.

  And it is fascinating. The first thing I notice is that I feel more connected. If everyone on earth is descended from two identifiable people—Adam and Eve—then the “family of man” isn’t just pabulum. It’s true. The guy who sells me bananas at the deli on 81st Street—he’s my cousin.

  But even more powerful is this feeling: My life is more significant. If the earth is ten billion years old, I’m barely a drop of water in the ocean that is the universe. But if the earth is six thousand years old, then I’ve been alive for a decent portion of the world’s existence. I’m no bit player. I’ve got a speaking part in the movie of life.

  My thought experiment crystallized a key tension I’ve noticed in the Bible. On the one hand, the Bible teaches extreme humility. Humans are sinful, barely worthy of praying to God.

  On the other hand, there’s a certain—I don’t know if arrogance is quite the right word. Maybe pride. Humans are the pinnacle of biblical creation, the ones God saved until last on the sixth day, beings that are vastly superior to the beasts and nature. We are made in God’s image. (As the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza said, if triangles could think, their God would be eminently triangular.)

  I believe that’s a key motivation to creationism: the need to feel less inconsequential. I remember Mark Looy—the publicist for the Creation Museum—saying, “Evolution says that we are the product of random processes. That we evolved via pond scum. When we say that, we’re not applying much value to humanity. If we say we’re a product of accidents and random processes, how much purpose and hope does that give to our youth?”

  Since I’ll never convert to creationism, I have to find some dignity and self-esteem and sacredness even with our mucky origins.

  Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

  —PROVERBS 22:6

  Day 78. I’ve started to wear sunglasses more often. I can’t find anything in the Bible prohibiting them, and they make my beard—which is now approaching my Adam’s apple—look slightly hipper. More indie record producer, less Crown Heights. Today I’ve taken my shades on a trip to the playground with my wife and son. Julie’s reading her People magazine on the bench, and I’m scampering around after Jasper.

  He wants to go on the swing.

  “OK, just give me a second,” I say.

  I take a bottle of Purell antibacterial lotion from the stroller bag. These playgrounds, they’re like a germ free-for-all. I wipe the chain on the left side of the swing, then start in on the right side. Jasper is whining that he wants to get on already.

  “Almost ready,” I say.

  Julie looks up from her magazine to see the battle in progress. “A. J.,” she says. “Helmet.”

  Helmet is Julie’s code word to me that I’m being a crazy overprotective father. We’ve had so many fights about this, she thought it’d be easier to just sum up her position with a single word: helmet. She chose helmet because, at one point, without irony, I checked out the prices of baby helmets on the internet.

  It’s just that these kids are so fragile, you know? They’ve only got that mushy little skull separating their brains from the sidewalk. They have only two years of an immune system built up.

  Last week Julie and I got into an argument because I said I didn’t want him going to something called the International Preschool. This is a preschool where a lot of UN workers send their kids.

  I said I don’t want him to become too interested in foreign countries because then he might live in one when he grows up.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, I want him to live in the same town I do.”

  “That’s why you don’t want him to go there?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s demented.”

  She told me that I have to back off. Otherwise I’ll be cutting his hot dog into tiny pieces when he’s nineteen and chaperoning him to the prom. That’s when she came up with helmet.

  Maybe she’s right. Maybe I should treat Jasper more like God treats humans in the Bible. He gave us free will. He relinquished some control because He wanted us to be able to make our own mistakes and have our own victories.

  Maybe I should. But I can’t. I can’t expose him to an unsanitary swing with its millions of microorganisms. So I give the right-hand chain another squirt of Purell. Julie shakes her head.

  It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting…

  —ECCLESIASTES 7:2

  Day 80. The extended family has gathered at my grandfather’s apartment in midtown for a late lunch. It’s to honor my grandmother, who died two years ago. It’s our own secular ritual—we get together once a year to reminisce. My grandmother was a remarkable woman—smart, funny, elegant, organized beyond belief (each of her six children was assigned a different color, and got towels only in that color, left notes in that color, and so on).

  And man, was she secular. For her, family was the alpha and omega, so she found the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac on a mountaintop particularly inexplicable.


  “How could a father even think about killing his son?” she once told me when I was a kid. “What a horrible story.”

  After her daughter’s switch to Orthodoxy, my grandmother—though she never stopped loving Kate—went from being secular to fiercely anti-religious. I remember walking down 57th Street with her. We passed a Hasidic man draped in his black hat and black coat. I looked at my grandmother, who was staring at the man, almost scowling—and then she darted her tongue out. Quick as a snake, just poked it out.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “I always stick my tongue out at people like that,” she said.

  “Do you think he saw?”

  “He saw,” she said. “He knows.”

  She was torn between her usual polite, elegant self and her real hatred for what she saw as religious fundamentalism. I often wonder what she would have thought of my experiment.

  Everyone is at the lunch, including both Kate and my vegan-feminist aunt Marti from Berkeley. Marti gives me some stern pointers on politically incorrect, violence-laden religious words to avoid.

  “You shouldn’t use the word sacred, because it comes from the same root word as sacrifice. As in animal sacrifice.”

  “OK.”

  “And bless comes from the Old English word bletsian, which means ‘consecrate with blood.’ So don’t use that.”

  “What about Bible?”

  “I’m not sure about that one.”

  “It comes from byblos, the Greek word for papyrus. Made from the corpses of once-living plants.”

  “Yes, maybe avoid that too,” she says.

  Kate also gives me suggestions on language. Right before lunch, Jasper wants to show me a fascinating trick in which he jumps from the rug to the wooden floor, so he tugs on my pants and says, “A. J.! A. J.!”

  “Yes, I’m watching.”

  “He calls you A. J.?” asks Kate.

  “Yeah. We’re on a first-name basis.”

  I’ve tried to convert Jasper to the more traditional “Dad” or “Daddy,” but he insists on A. J. So I’ve gotten used to it.

  “Children aren’t supposed to use their parents’ first names,” says Kate. “It’s disrespectful.”

  Kate’s probably right; in biblical times, there was no such thing as an informal I’m-friends-with-my-kid father. Without me knowing it, Jasper was violating the “honor your parents” commandment.

  A few minutes later, when we all sit down to lunch, my grandfather asks me, “What’s the strangest rule you have to follow?”

  I mentally scan my list of Five Most Perplexing Rules. I choose one at random. “Probably the one about how if you’re in a fistfight, and the wife of your opponent grabs your private parts, you must cut off her hand.”

  “That,” he says, “is very strange indeed.”

  And it is. But that’s exactly what the Bible says in Deuteronomy 25:11–12:

  When men fight with one another, and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand; your eye shall have no pity.

  So far (knock on wood) I’ve avoided getting in a brawl with a man whose wife looks like she has a firm grip. So I guess I’m obeying the commandment by default and can congratulate myself on that.

  But, as with the mixed fibers, it baffles me. Why the specificity? Why does the Bible ban this particular below-the-belt maneuver and not, say, a kidney punch or a kick between the thighs? Julie suggests it’s because the writer of Deuteronomy had this precise unpleasant scenario happen to him and so decided to forbid it for all eternity.

  Unfortunately, Kate is within earshot when I tell my grandfather about the private parts rule. Damn. I thought she had been in the kitchen. I didn’t want her hearing me talk about the crazy ones without balancing it with some good ones.

  And sure enough, she looks stricken. Like she just discovered that her son smokes two packs a day. She had studied the Bible for years but had never learned about the husband-grabbing part. It’s just not one that gets a lot of play at synagogue.

  The next day, I get three voice mails. All from Kate. “Is part of your biblical life that you’re not allowed to answer the phone?” she says.

  I call her back.

  “I talked to my rabbi,” Kate says. “And, yes, it is in the Torah.” But…it’s supposed to represent something broader: Do not embarrass others. The wife here is embarrassing her husband by assuming he needs help. And the wife is embarrassing the husband’s opponent by, well, grabbing his privates. Plus, adds Kate, you didn’t actually chop off the wife’s hand. That’s metaphorical. The woman was required only to pay a fine.

  OK. It does seem more rational if interpreted that way. But my question is: Why didn’t the Bible just say that? Why not just say “Don’t embarrass others”? Why the mysterious code?

  I’ve asked all of the Jewish members of my spiritual board this question. The best answer I’ve gotten is this, from a rabbi named Noah Weinberg, a founder of Aish HaTorah, the outreach group: Life is a jigsaw puzzle, he told me. The joy and challenge of life—and the Bible—is figuring things out. “If a jigsaw puzzle came numbered, you’d return it to the store.” Same with life.

  It’s a good answer, but only partly satisfying. I have to keep digging.

  Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field.

  —DEUTERONOMY 28:16

  Day 82. Tonight I break the Eighth Commandment—no stealing—and I pay the price.

  It happens when I try to research different types of biblical incense on the internet. Problem is our wireless connection is on the fritz. So I go in search of a signal. I take my laptop to the gray-walled emergency stairwell and descend to the fourth floor. I figure maybe I can glom onto a neighbor’s network. I try one called Sonicboy. No dice. Password required. I go down another flight. Zildo y Zelda? Nope. Also requires a password. But down another flight, I find a network with the beautifully generic name Wireless. An excellent sign. If they can’t be bothered to come up with a name, maybe they don’t know about this newfangled thing called passwords. Yes, I get a signal. But it’s not coming in strong enough, so I climb down another two stairs. At which point I trip and slam my knee into the railing and bash my laptop against the wall.

  So I deserved it. The Bible says thou shalt not steal; I stole my neighbor’s wireless signal. And I’m now limping around the house with a bum knee.

  Was this God’s punishment? I don’t know. I don’t honestly think so. Would my ancient Israelite ancestors have thought so (assuming I explained wireless internet etiquette to them)? Maybe. As with everything biblical, there’s no simple answer about the consequences of sin. You can find several major themes.

  The first is that God will punish you, and He will punish you in this life. This motif is best seen in Deuteronomy 28, which contains the three most terrifying pages in the history of publishing. Here you read every horrible disease and weather pattern that will befall you if you don’t live by the Bible.

  The Lord will “smite you with consumption, and with fever, inflammation, and fiery heat, and with drought, and with blasting and with mildew.”

  And that’s just a little warm-up. It continues:

  “And the heavens over your head shall be brass, and the earth under you shall be iron. And the Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust.”

  It’s actually oddly beautiful. Take away the fact that the words condemn you to a life of aching, thirsty, itchy torment, and it’s poetic, breathtaking.

  “You shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness…”

  “You shall betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her…”

  It goes on to say that you shall be reduced to eating your own children and trying—unsuccessfully—to sell yourself as a slave. That’s right. You aren’t good enough for slavery. There is also a section on the good things that will happen if you fo
llow the law. But it’s only one-quarter the length of the curses. It’s the curses that stay with you.

  In some hyperreligious circles, this type of thinking persists. Jerry Falwell, for instance, argued that 9/11 was God’s punishment for America’s depravity.

  I find myself slipping into the bad-people-get-what’s-coming-to-them mind-set now and again. But only for a second. The world doesn’t seem to work that way. Just look at the evil people in America. They don’t have boils on their legs, and they’re not eating their children. Many are living in penthouses, and some have their own reality shows.

  Thankfully, the Bible is a big book, an infinitely complex book, and there are many alternatives. One recurring theme—found mostly in the New Testament—says that you will be rewarded in heaven. Another strain—found in books like Ecclesiastes and Job—takes a modern, almost agnostic, view.

  Ecclesiastes is probably my favorite book of the Bible. I first read about it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I have loved it ever since. Called Qohelet in Hebrew, the book is a collection of wisdom and reminiscences from a man who identifies himself as King Solomon. If you believe modern biblical scholars, the author was probably not Solomon but instead a now-anonymous poet from the third century BCE. Whoever he was, the writing is awe inspiring.

  Every time I read it, I feel myself doing a little silent call-and-response with the text. “Yes.” “That’s right.” I feel the thrill of recognizing thoughts that I have had myself, but that I’ve never been able to capture in such beautiful language. And I feel the oddity of finding myself on the same wavelength as a man who lived two thousand years ago. It’s the closest I’ve come to proselytizing—telling friends they have to read Ecclesiastes.

  In any case, the author of Ecclesiastes says: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.”