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

by A. J. Jacobs

  “We’ve had documentary crews here before. And if you show this alone, out of context, it seems barbaric and irrational.”

  Rabbi Boteach is right. I know I’ll be committing the same sin. Since I can’t devote my entire book to explaining ultra-Orthodox rituals, kaparot will, by necessity, seem out of context.

  “Is it any more irrational than a lot of things in our culture?” he asks. “Is it more irrational than Botox? Or more irrational than transubstantiation?”

  Again, maybe he’s got a point: In my admittedly brief encounters with the Hasidim, I’ve found them to be a lot more reasonable than I imagined. The ones I’ve met have been, for the most part, bright and friendly. And they have a fascinating self-awareness. Early on, Rabbi Epstein told me he took his kids to Colonial Williamsburg. One of his kids asked him, “Do people still live like this?”

  And Rabbi Epstein told him, “No one lives like they did in the eighteenth century. Well, except for in Crown Heights.”

  So they aren’t wackjobs. Well, let me qualify that. Most of them aren’t wackjobs. There are exceptions.

  Case in point: the short Hasidic Jew wandering among the chickens with a sandwich board over his black coat. The sandwich board has a huge photo of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the Lubavitchers, the huge Brooklyn-based Hasidic movement.

  “The rebbe is coming soon!” he says with an Israeli accent.

  “I thought Rabbi Schneerson died a few years ago.”

  “Well, we interpret it as dying, but he’s not dead. He’s going to come back, and there will be the Messianic Age.”

  This guy had drunk the kosher Kool-Aid.

  “What does that mean? What will the Messianic Age look like?” I ask.

  “Money will grow on trees. And clothing will also grow on trees. And the sand will be like candy. Everything will be provided for, so all we have to do is study Torah all day.”

  What an amazingly detailed vision. I expected some vague generalizations, not beaches of Skittles and orchards of chinos. As for the activities, I already study the Bible all day, so this wasn’t too enticing.

  “Have you ever studied anything but religion?” I ask.

  “I had a little math and science when I was a kid, but not much. When I’m done with religion, I’ll study other topics.” He smiles.

  “But you’ll never be done with religion, right?”

  “I’m not done yet.”

  Man, do I hate that insular thinking. It makes me think of my distant ancestor, the rabbi named Vilna Gaon. He railed against that mind-set, saying an understanding of the Bible required a broad education, including, as the Britannica describes it, “the study of math, astronomy, geography, botany, and zoology.”

  I find Rabbi Epstein again. Enough procrastinating. It’s time for me to actually do this ritual. I pay ten dollars to a man behind a table and am directed to the open back of a huge truck. It’s packed with chickens fluttering in coops.

  “One male,” says Epstein. Men get male chickens, he explains, women get females, and pregnant women get one of each to cover all contingencies.

  The truck guy hands me my chicken—white feathered, red beaked, very much alive.

  “Hold it under the wings,” says Epstein. He takes the chicken and demonstrates for me a full-nelson grip.

  “Really? But—”

  “It’s comfortable for them, totally comfortable,” he assures me.

  The chicken squawks. I stroke him to calm him down.

  Now here’s the thing: I know the rotisserie chicken I get at Boston Market did not die of natural causes. It did not drift off to eternal sleep in its old age surrounded by loved ones and grandchicks at a chicken hospice. It had its throat slit too. But modern society has done an excellent job of shielding me from this fact.

  I look at my chicken again. Oh, man. I have an awful epiphany: The chicken kind of looks like Jasper—the same big eyes, same cocked head; it all but says “Da-da” (or actually, “A. J.”).

  You don’t have to be Maimonides to see where this is going. I’m playing Abraham to the chicken’s Isaac. And I don’t have even a speck of Abraham’s faith. I feel nauseated and loosen my grip. The chicken flaps out of my hands and starts scampering down the street. Epstein scampers after it, scoops it up, and brings it back to me. I stroke the chicken’s head again.

  “Now wave it in a circle over your head.”

  This is one of the strangest parts of the kaparot ritual—you are supposed to gently twirl the bird three times in the air.

  Epstein is holding the prayer book for me to read: “This is my exchange,” I say. “This is my substitute, this is my expiation. This chicken shall go to its death, and I shall proceed to a good, long life and peace.” I was hoping I’d feel my sins flow out of me, but I don’t. I’m too focused on holding the flapping chicken.

  Next stop is the kosher slaughterers. There are three of them standing behind a counter on a raised platform, bringing to mind very violent pharmacists. They’re wearing black garbage bags over their bodies to protect themselves from splattered blood. And, my goodness, is there blood—it coats the ground, it spots the faces, it soaks the gloves. The smell of chicken blood is so strong, a girl in line is dry heaving. In the era of avian flu, can this be a good idea?

  I give my chicken to the slaughterer. He takes it, flips it over, bends back the neck, and makes three quick strokes with the knife. The chicken is dead, just like that.

  The butcher tosses my chicken in an upside-down red Con Ed traffic cone, which is where it will stay as the blood drains out of its body. My chicken will then be plucked and packaged and trucked to a needy family somewhere in Brooklyn.

  I’m elbowed out of the way. I’m still in my city-boy stupor: My chicken was alive; now, three knife strokes later, it’s dead. Epstein is saying something, but I can’t really focus. I’m too dazed.

  As I said, I’ve started to look at life differently. When you’re thanking God for every little joy—every meal, every time you wake up, every time you take a sip of water—you can’t help but be more thankful for life itself, for the unlikely and miraculous fact that you exist at all.

  What I mean is that I do admire the sentiment behind kaparot. I think it’s good to be reminded that I could be scampering around the street one minute, and the next minute find myself gone from this world—that life is so absurdly precious and fleeting. And yet I don’t admire the method. Perhaps if I grew up as a Hasid, it’d make more sense to me. But as Rabbi Boteach says, out of context, it just seems barbaric. If I ever do kaparot again, I’m going to do it like my Aunt Kate. Some Orthodox Jews, Kate included, practice a tamer—but still approved—version of kaparot: Instead of poultry, they wave money over their heads.

  As I walk to the subway and the smell of chickens fades, I thank God that He discontinued the daily need for ritual slaughter. I had enough trouble with a chicken. I’d hate to try a goat or an ox.

  And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes…you shall leave them for the poor

  —LEVITICUS 19:10

  Day 135. Our living room table is covered with four large terra-cotta pots containing cucumber plants. Or at least scraggly, struggling versions of cucumber plants.

  I’ve been trying to engage in some agriculture, seeing as so many biblical laws involve farming. I bought cucumber seeds online (cucumber was eaten by the Hebrews when they were slaves in Egypt, along with melons, leeks, and garlic) and planted them in soil. For good measure, I added a couple of dozen cinnamon-colored plant-food pellets that called to mind that discussion of rabbit digestion at the Creation Museum.

  The cucumbers do grow—they each get to be the size of a Good & Plenty candy. And then they promptly die. I don’t understand why. To date I’ve grown and killed about a hundred dozen tiny, prickly, inedible cucumbers.

  My hope had been to leave cucumber “gleanings.” The idea of gleanings is one of my favorites in the Bible. It goes like this:
When you harvest your field, don’t reap the entire field. Leave the corners unharvested so that the leftovers—the gleanings—can be gathered by the poor.

  It’s a beautiful and compassionate rule. Plus, the commandment rewards people for doing a half-assed job, which I think is a nice notion. Part of the idea is that, ultimately, the land belongs to God, so you respect that and be sure to provide for God’s children. It’s been called the first welfare system.

  And it can lead to unexpected blessings. Consider this great, romantic story in the Old Testament’s Book of Ruth: Ruth was an impoverished foreigner who had followed her mother-in-law Naomi to Israel. To survive, Ruth gathered gleanings of barley. One day the rich owner of the land—a man named Boaz—spotted Ruth gleaning and was smitten. When she found out about his crush, she bathed herself, anointed herself, put on her finest clothes, and sneaked into Boaz’s room to “lie at his feet.” (Some say the phrase is a euphemism for lying elsewhere.) Boaz was startled but pleased. They were soon married—and it all started because of the command to leave gleanings.

  In any case, how to apply this amazing notion of gleaning to my life, since the cucumber experiment is flopping? I suppose that gleaning could be generalized to mean “give to the poor.” But I’m already doing that, thanks to tithing and other commands. Gleaning is a slightly different creature.

  I decide to try to figure out how to update it. Which is hard. If I do a lax job on an Esquire article, it doesn’t help the poor. It just means a copy editor has to fill in Scarlett Johansson’s age and unsplit my infinitives.

  But then I have this idea: What’s the closest thing to harvesting in my life? Going to an ATM. What if I leave twenty dollars in the machine whenever I take out two hundred? I do this twice, and it isn’t bad. Though I get the queasy feeling that Ron Perelman is coming in after me, and that he’s using my twenty-dollar bill as Kleenex.

  So I came up with a new plan: if I accidentally drop anything valuable on the street, I’ll leave it there. It would be God’s will. I would not gather it up.

  Perhaps I psyched myself out: For several days, I don’t drop a thing, not even so much as a nickel or a clump of lint. But then, yesterday, I am pulling out my wallet on the corner of 81st and Columbus, and a crumpled five-dollar bill falls out. I glance at it for a second and keep walking.

  “Excuse me, sir!”

  I turn around. A woman is holding up my bill.

  “You dropped this!”

  “Uh, that’s OK,” I say.

  “It’s yours. I saw it drop out of your pocket,” she says.

  I pause.

  “No, it wasn’t mine,” I say, and keep walking. This lying has to stop.

  Praise the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings!

  —PSALMS 33:2

  Day 138. My white garments have gotten a shade darker, thanks to food stains and general urban pollution. But I still love wearing them. They make me feel buoyant, like I’m floating a couple of feet above the sidewalk. They’re such a success, I decide that I should have an even more biblical appearance, which is how I settle on following Psalms 33:2. This instructs us to praise the Lord on a harp of ten strings.

  “Do ten-string harps even exist anymore?” I wondered. Or would I have to make my own? Maybe I’ll gain worldwide acclaim as the only living ten-string harpist.

  One Google search later, I discovered that I would not be the only ten-string harpist. Far from it. When will it sink into my skull that there is no such thing as an obscure Bible verse?

  Turns out there’s a thriving underground world devoted to the biblical instrument. You can buy ten-string harps on eBay. You can send a Christmas e-card featuring ten-string harp music (the harp is plucked by a computer-generated angel who looks like a winged, demure Victoria’s Secret model). You can read about how the Messianic age will usher in ten-string harps that will miraculously expand the octave from eight notes to ten notes.

  The Tiffany of ten-string harps is an Indiana-based shop called Jubilee Harps. (Motto: “Home is where your harp is!”) The website features audio samples of harp music, a photo gallery, accessories such as amplifiers and charcoal gray harp cases, and promises of spiritual rewards: “Although not fully understood, people today are experiencing the healing powers of the harp. Just hold this harp close to your heart, rest your face on the side of its arm, and feel peace and serenity surround you.”

  I call to find out more. The co-owner, Mary Woods, gets on the phone; she tells me that she and her husband, Rick, have sold more than one thousand of their handmade wooden King David–inspired harps to clients in sixteen countries.

  They set up shop soon after Rick was downsized from his job as a scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb. He made his first harp for a celebration at their church.

  “It was late one night,” Mary recalls, “and Rick got me to come out to his workshop, and I looked at the harp, and I couldn’t quit crying. He thought I was mad because he spent three months in the workshop, and all he had was this harp. But I went over and hugged it, and I couldn’t quit crying.”

  At this point, two things happen: Mary starts choking up on the other end of the phone. And I start feeling like more of a voyeuristic schmuck than I have since this year began. Much has touched me in these months—the humility of the Amish, the joy of Hasidic dancing, the power of prayer—but I can’t relate to Mary’s passion for a biblical harp. It’s totally foreign to me. I thank her and hang up.

  In the end, I did buy a ten-string harp online—a $40 one from a secondhand store, not the $800 version offered by Jubilee. Mine is made of coffee-colored wood and is about the size of a cafeteria tray. I play it twice a day, as instructed by the Psalms. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but the good news is, it’s hard to screw up too badly on a harp. A pluck here, a glissando there, and it sounds soothing.

  I sometimes take it out for walks, which mostly inspires the cautious sideways glances I’ve become so accustomed to. I have had a couple of notable reactions, though. When I strummed my harp during a recent stroll on Columbus Avenue, a woman walking her dog offered me a dollar. Also, a white-haired man near Rockefeller Center started yelling at me. “A ten-string harp? The Bible actually says an eight-string harp, not a ten-string harp!” He could have been playing with my mind, or he could have been your garden-variety crazy, hard to tell.

  In the end, though, the harp isn’t transporting me. I’m going to have to find another PIN code to spiritual transcendence.

  These are the living things which you may eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.

  —LEVITICUS 11:2

  Day 140. The Bible is filled with so many Thou Shalt Nots that I’ve started to take advantage of anything the Bible does allow. Even if said allowed activity isn’t so alluring. Which is how, today, I ended up eating a bug.

  To start at the beginning: Before this project, I’d had just a little exposure to the Bible’s food laws. When I was in college, I used to order kosher meals on airplanes because someone told me that they were better—the reasoning was that the airlines have to give the kosher meals special attention and can’t throw them in the vat with everyone else’s slop. Frankly, I found the meals no tastier than the airline’s secular lasagna. So I stopped doing that. Which is probably good, since feigning piety to upgrade your lunch is ethically dubious.

  My airline adventure wasn’t a total waste, though. I did pick up the very basics of the Bible’s dietary restrictions. Namely these rules, found in Leviticus:

  You shall eat no pork or bacon or any other pig meat (land creatures must have cloven hoofs and chew their cud to be edible).

  No shellfish (sea creatures must have both fins and scales to be edible; shrimp, clams, and their cousins have neither).

  No blood.

  No rabbits.

  Certain birds—most of them birds of prey, such as eagles, vultures, and falcons—are off-limits.

  Why the food taboos? The Bible itself doesn’t give a rea
son. I’d always thought they developed as a primitive way to avoid trichinosis and other nasty diseases. But apparently I was wrong. Most anthropologists now dismiss that idea. The more popular theory nowadays is that the food bans were all about creating holiness and separation. The Israelites wanted to keep themselves apart from other tribes such as the pork-loving Philistines. They were marking their territory with menus.

  Observant Jews follow the Bible’s laws today. In fact, they follow a far more elaborate version of the laws, a system recorded by the rabbis over the centuries. The strictest kosher eater abides by hundreds of other rules, including regulations about separating milk and meat that could take years to learn.

  A handful of Christians keep the basic rules, including the evangelical author of a book I own called The Maker’s Diet, who writes: “In an odd twist of logic, many religious Americans dismiss the Jewish dietary laws as outdated legalism, invalid for the modern era. Yet they embrace the fundamental truths of the Ten Commandments as universal and timeless.” This guy’s in the minority. Most Christians believe that Jesus’s sacrifice freed Christians from the food laws.

  Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to abide by the rules explicitly listed in the Bible (as opposed to the full rabbinical kosher laws). It’s been an enormous challenge.

  Granted, in some sense, I’ve gotten lucky. The laws align with my own preferences. I’ve never liked shellfish. Lobsters, for instance, remind me too much of something you’d kill with Raid. So it wasn’t a hardship to give up the ocean’s bottom-feeders. I don’t eat much bacon, either; my cholesterol already hovers around the score of a professional bowler, and I don’t need it to break 300.