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

by A. J. Jacobs

  “In the Torah, a woman in her period has to be departed,” says Benyamim. This is why, he explains, Samaritan houses have a special room for women in their cycle. “My wife has her own TV and small refrigerator. It’s like a hotel room.”

  Can she come out?

  “Yes, and we can talk, but not face to face, because of the saliva. And we do talk. Mostly about my cooking.”

  Benyamim must cook the meals, since his wife cannot touch the food. Benyamim tries to put an upbeat gloss on it: It’s a vacation from household chores for the women.

  “Fifty years ago, there was a special tent for the women. And I believe it was the happiest tent in the camp.”

  I don’t know. I still have trouble accepting the menstrual laws, whether Jewish or Samaritan.

  Before I leave, I ask the obvious question: What do the Samaritans think about the parable of Good Samaritan? Well, not surprisingly, they don’t object. They like it. There is even a Samaritan-owned Good Samaritan Coffee Shop in the West Bank.

  Benyamim tells me he has given Jesus’s parable a lot of thought and has his own take on it: It was autobiographical. Benyamim believes that the wounded man is meant to represent Jesus himself. And Jesus chose to have a Samaritan rescue him because he’d had a good experience in Samaria. When Jesus fled the Pharisees and passed through Samaria, the locals treated him kindly and believed he was the savior (John 4).

  On the cab ride back to the hotel, my mind keeps coming back to the Samaritan Bible. So similar, but so different, too. What if history had taken a left turn? What if the Samaritan Torah had become the standard, and millions of Semitic faithful flooded to Mount Gerizim every year to sacrifice lambs, except for a few hundred people called the Jews, who worshipped at an obscure site known as the Western Wall?

  I give thanks to thee, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify thy name for ever.

  —PSALMS 86:12

  Day 204. I can’t stop thinking about the two praying guys in Yossi’s story: the one who emerges refreshed and the one who emerges more harried than before. Sometimes I’m the first guy, sometimes the second.

  Today I’m taking a rest from a walk on a set of stairs near the Jaffa Gate. Or maybe near the Lion’s Gate. I’m not sure. Frankly, I’m lost. But I’m resting here on the stone steps, which are cool and shaded and have a bumpy surface that makes them look like a Rice Krispies treat.

  I have my head bowed and my eyes closed. I’m trying to pray, but my mind is wandering. I can’t settle it down. It wanders over to an Esquire article I just wrote. It wasn’t half bad, I think to myself. I liked that turn of phrase in the first paragraph.

  And then I am hit with a realization. And hit is the right word—it felt like a punch to my stomach. Here I am being prideful about creating an article in a midsize American magazine. But God—if He exists—He created the world. He created flamingos and supernovas and geysers and beetles and the stones for these steps I’m sitting on.

  “Praise the Lord,” I say out loud.

  I’d always found the praising-God parts of the Bible and my prayer books awkward. The sentences about the all-powerful, almighty, all-knowing, the host of hosts, He who has greatness beyond our comprehension. I’m not used to talking like that. It’s so over the top. I’m used to understatement and hedging and irony. And why would God need to be praised in the first place? God shouldn’t be insecure. He’s the ultimate being.

  Now I can sort of see why. It’s not for him. It’s for us. It takes you out of yourself and your prideful little brain.

  Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the sabbath…

  —EXODUS 31:16

  Day 205. As I wander over to a café near the hotel for a bagel, I realize something: Walking around Jerusalem in my biblical persona is at once freeing and vaguely disappointing. In New York—even though it’s home to the Naked Cowboy and Gene Shalit—I’m still unusual enough to stand out. But in Israel I’m just one of the messianic crowd. A guy with strange outfits and eccentric facial hair? Big deal. Seen three dozen today. Jerusalem is like the Galápagos Islands of religion—you can’t open your eyes without spotting an exotic creature.

  Speaking of which, it’s Friday. The day I’m finally going to meet him, the most exotic creature of my family, the official black sheep, the man who gave me the germ of the idea for this book: Guru Gil.

  When I called up Guru Gil a couple of weeks ago, he said he wanted to meet me at the Western Wall, the holiest site for Jews in Jerusalem. He’s there every day. I arrive on a drizzly, chilly Friday afternoon. It’s an amazing place: dozens of mostly Orthodox Jews chanting and swaying, their fringes swinging, some so deep in ecstatic prayer that they are clenching their fists and shuddering. It’s impossible not to be moved by the combined kilowatts of faith.

  Gil is nowhere to be found. When I ask his whereabouts, I discover that my family isn’t the only one with mixed feelings about Gil. An Orthodox man from the Netherlands tells me that he and Gil no longer speak. What’s the feud about? He won’t say. But whatever Gil did, he did “these things again and again and again!”

  Finally I spot Gil. I recognize him from the many, many photos on the cover of his book. He’s walking down the steps, his long beard forked in half by a headwind, a big white tuft blowing over each shoulder.

  “Gil? It’s A. J. Jacobs.”

  “You’re A. J? You look so religious,” he says, eyeing my beard. “I was expecting something else.”

  “Well, it’s not as long as yours.”

  “You’ll get there,” says Gil.

  He’s smaller than I thought. Somehow, in my mind, thanks to years of family legends, he had grown into a Paul Bunyanesque super-Jew. But in real life, he’s far south of six feet. And with the beard, he looks his sixty years.

  I tell him I’m in the middle of reading his book.

  “In the middle of it? Well, you’re the first person to ever put it down.”

  I can’t tell if he’s joking or if he’s actually offended.

  He grabs a chair and a prayer book, and we sit down to worship next to the sixty-foot wall. It turns out that this is Gil’s second trip to the wall today. Every day he wakes up at 1:45 a.m., takes a ritual bath, then arrives at the wall at 3:00 a.m. He stays there for a few hours, wrapping tefillin—the leather prayer straps—on willing tourists, then goes home for study, only to return in the afternoon. If you think, as I did, that 1:45 a.m. is an ungodly hour, you’d be wrong. At least according to Gil, the most spiritual time of day is midnight to eight.

  After an hour or so of prayers, we head back to Gil’s apartment for Shabbat dinner. His guests arrive a few minutes later.

  “Come in and sit down,” he says sternly. “You’re late.”

  Gil’s dinner is quasifamous, a minor tourist attraction for students and seekers. Tonight we’ve got a couple of Russian yeshiva students, a pair of rabbi’s daughters from Jersey, an Orthodox shrink and his wife, and this spaced-out Berkeley dude in a rainbow-colored yarmulke. Gil warned the Berkeley dude not to hit on the rabbi’s daughters, or “I’ll break both your legs.”

  “Hello?” shouts Gil, after we’re seated. “Shut up! Earth to people! Earth to people!”

  We stop chattering. Time for the ground rules.

  “Whoever asks the most questions gets the biggest dessert. But they have to be good questions. They can’t be ‘What’s for dessert?’”

  Gil runs the dinner like he’s still head of his yurt cult in upstate New York. Though nowadays he talks. And during two minutes of the introductory prayers, no one else does—or else you have to go wash your hands, as required by Orthodox custom.

  He looks at the Berkeley dude.

  “Are you going to talk?”

  “Uh…no.”

  “You just did. Go wash your hands.”

  The Berkeley dude is already walking on eggshells. He was the first guest to arrive and made the mistake of touching his cutlery prematurely, prompting Gil to snap, “Stop with the plates,
stop with the spoon, knock it off!”

  Not wanting to make eye contact, I glance at the surroundings. The dining room table takes up most of the floor space. The walls are filled with photos of white-bearded rabbis. In the corner, I spot a snapshot of Gil playing a…ten-string harp. Yes, one alarmingly like mine. Gil tells me later that he designed the harp himself. “I based the notes on the sounds of a Hawaiian waterfall,” he says.

  One of Gil’s big themes is that everything has a reason. Julie has the same point of view, but Gil takes it to the extreme: Absolutely nothing is an accident. A few years ago, he tells us, he got bird droppings on his tefillin. He was devastated. “I thought, ‘God hates me! He hates my prayers. All these years I’ve been trying to please him, this is how he feels about me.’ He took the tefillin to an expert, and it turned out that one of the parchments was upside down. God didn’t hate him—He was just letting him know.

  Each of the Bible’s laws has a reason, too. A perfectly rational explanation.

  “I thought some of them we don’t know the reason for,” I say.

  “Whoever told you that wasn’t a deep person,” says Gil.

  And remember, the little rules are just as important as the big ones.

  “If you were in medical school to study brain surgery, would you want to follow all the rules? Or just the ‘main ones’?” asks Gil.

  One of the rabbi’s daughters has a question:

  “Why is it important for a guy to have a beard?”

  “Because Abraham had a beard.”

  “He also had two wives,” replies the rabbi’s daughter.

  “I beg your pardon. One was a concubine.”

  “Solomon had seven hundred wives,” I pipe up.

  “Shut up,” says Gil. “In those days you could. But since it was going to be forbidden later, Jacob was buried with Rachel, not his other wives.”

  The rabbi’s daughter isn’t satisfied. Gil tries again:

  “If you see a guy with a long beard, you know he’s not a warrior. There’s no way. You can’t fight with one of these things. The first they’d do is grab your beard. It’s a handle on your head.”

  That is one I hadn’t heard. Gil takes a big swig of his red wine, about half of which dribbles into his beard. He gets up to clear the first course, a vegetable soup. The chatter at the table devolves to whom we know in common. Gil comes back. He is not well pleased.

  “Only holy topics!”

  “But what is holy?” says one of the twentysomething Russians. “Every topic can be holy.”

  This guy had given Gil some lip earlier in the night—he kept asking to sing a Russian song—and now Gil has had enough.

  “You have no idea how hot things can get around here,” Gil thunders. “One time, I had a guy from a yeshiva sitting right over there, and he was giving me a hard time. And I said, ‘Look, I have two black belts in judo.’

  “And you know what the guy says?

  “‘Oh, yeah? I know martial arts too.’

  “So I jump up and grab him in a choke hold, and he turns blue in the face and goes ‘Ahhhggghghh!’ And I let go, and from then on, he was the sweetest guest I ever had.

  “Don’t…push…the…buttons, kid. OK?”

  The Russian says nothing.

  I decide that Gil’s shtick is part bully, part vaudevillian, part charismatic leader. He’s an ultrareligious Donald Trump, and this is his boardroom. Maybe because I’m ex-family, I never get fully shellacked. He doesn’t call me “klutz” or “idiot,” as he does the others. The most I got is a “bozo!” when I wash my hands incorrectly.

  I can see how he was a cult leader. You can’t take your eyes off him. When he’s telling a story, he’ll jump out of his wicker chair to preach an important point. He’ll laugh for no apparent reason—during prayers, he just started giggling, his face reddening, apparently filled with the joy of God. He also weeps. He was talking about a rabbi he knew, stopped midsentence, looked away, and cried for a good minute, as the rest of us silently contemplated our wineglasses.

  He talks about his days as a cult leader only occasionally. At one point he grouses about the burden of having forty servants. “You know what I said every day? ‘God, get them out of here!’ What a pain in the tuchus to have to tell forty people what to do.”

  When he finds out that one of the girls speaks American Sign Language, he boasts of the sign language he invented as a cult leader—and how it swept New York in the 1970s.

  “I found that a lot of my signs were the same as deaf sign language. Like the word understand.”

  Gil puts two of his fingers on his palm.

  “You just did the sign for toast,” says the girl.

  Gil shrugs.

  “Well, it wasn’t the most important thing that I invented in my life.”

  At about nine o’clock, Gil says it’s nearing his bedtime, so we say the final prayers and pass around a cup of water for hand washing. At least the men do. When the shrink’s wife tries to, Gil explodes.

  “Ahhhhhhh! Ahhhh!! No woman will wash hands at my table!!!”

  Gil is not a feminist. He calms down, tries to soften it.

  “No foxy woman, anyway. A short, fat woman, yes.”

  I look at the shrink’s wife, a sixtyish woman who would fit in well at a Palm Beach bingo game. She isn’t in the traditional sense foxy.

  “Why not women?” she asks.

  “Because you’ll give this guy bad dreams!” says Gil.

  He points at me. I smile weakly.

  After the hand-washing incident, I get ready to go. Gil grabs my hand, looks me in the eyes, and says, “I love you.” Oh man, my family would have a heart attack if they heard that one. How to respond?

  “Uh…thanks for dinner!” I say.

  As I walked down the cobblestone streets of the Old City, I remembered that Gil, when he first met my aunt Kate at a party, said those same words: “I love you.” I can understand my grandfather’s alarm. I sure wouldn’t want my daughter marrying the Guru Gil of the twenty-first century.

  Granted, he didn’t end up strangling that Russian. In fact, he seems to me more of a religious clown than a felon. And I even agreed with a couple of his teachings. This one seemed kind of wise: “Whenever you’re sad, things aren’t working out for you, look around, see if there’s someone else in trouble, go and help them. And I promise you, I promise you, I promise you, your problems will be solved.”

  But, overall, what I found offensive and subtly dangerous about Gil was that he claimed to have all the answers. As he reminded me several times. “I’m glad you found me,” he said. “Because I have all the answers.” And later: “If you have any questions, call Gil. Others will lead you astray.”

  He’s a spokesman for the arrogant side of religion. My favorite parts of the Bible are the ones that take the complete opposite tack, that admit that we don’t know everything, that stress the mystery of God and the universe. Like Ecclesiastes 6:12 says:

  For who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? For who can tell man what will be after him under the sun?

  Month Eight: April

  Let my people go.

  —EXODUS 5:1

  Day 215. I’ve been home for a week. Julie’s still recovering from her stint as a solo mom, and I’m still trying to decompress from Israel.

  Israel was so intense, I need a week of as little activity as possible. I’ve been spending a lot of time slack jawed on the couch watching Scripture-themed movies. Julie ordered me Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments on Netflix. Man, I hadn’t remembered it being quite so gloriously cheesy as it is. God sounds like Darth Vader. The seductive bare-midriffed Egyptian dancers look like they strayed off the set of Elvis’s Clambake. And director Cecil B. DeMille is the most unhumble man in the world. Just in case there was any question of who is responsible for this masterpiece, he fills the screen with DIRECTED BY CECIL B. DEMILLE in 8,000-point font. He gets higher billing th
an God.

  It’s a nice break from ruminating about Israel. Because Israel has got me tied up in knots. On the good side, it can humble you. Even physically it humbles you. The vastness of the desert humbles you. The height of the Western Wall humbles you. The echoing interior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre humbles you. And the history. All those millions of seekers who have walked the exact same cobblestone streets asking the exact same questions—it’s hard not to feel like you’re part of something much larger than yourself.

  But Israel can also be dangerous. It can bring out the fundamentalist in all of us. It can bring out everyone’s inner Guru Gil. It can nurture your self-righteous side. I saw this even as I took the cab back from Newark Airport. I looked at the pedestrians yammering away on their cell phones, no doubt speaking evil tongue and coveting. Ugh. “I’m not like that,” I tell myself. “I’m so much more biblical than these people. These secular losers.” Which, I know, is a completely unbiblical way to think.

  You shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother…

  —DEUTERONOMY 15:7

  Day 219. One unavoidable side effect of biblical living: You think a lot about your forefathers. In my case, I find myself fascinated by my father’s father.

  My grandfather, who died when I was in high school, wore a gray fedora and lived by the Hudson River in an apartment with a plastic-covered couch. I remember him being perhaps the gentlest man I’ve ever met, a man who spoke so quietly that you’d have to lean forward to hear.

  And I remember him giving away money. Whenever we’d go for a walk—which usually meant that we were either traveling to or returning from moo shoo chicken at Szechuan Palace—we’d inevitably pass a homeless person, and my grandfather would inevitably fish a couple of quarters out of his pocket. No doubt it was a reaction to his past. He grew up in a tenement on the Lower East Side. He’d never tell you, but his stepmother—a woman straight out of Grimms’—kept a lock on the icebox so that my grandfather wouldn’t try to sneak an extra slice of bread.