The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

by A. J. Jacobs

"I don't feel whole," said one. "I want to feel whole again."

  Another asked: "Can you imagine what it's like to have sex with a foreskin? It must be like watching color TV." (I never was able to confirm this, but the claim is that circumcision blunts the sensation.)

  Most of the time was spent discussing homespun methods that would allow the men to regrow their foreskins. I'll spare you the details. I'm sure the internet has plenty more information for those who are interested.

  Sexual sensitivity aside, the medical aspect of circumsicion remains a matter of debate. The American Academy of Pediatrics makes no recommendation either way. Circumcision may reduce penile cancer, and there's now compelling evidence it lowers men's susceptibility to AIDS. (After my biblical year ended, the World Heath Organization recommended medical circumcision be practiced in high-risk locales.)

  So when our first son, Jasper, was born, I had mixed feelings about circumcising him. I didn't think he'd end up in a San Francisco basement venting his anger, but why put him through the pain? There's no rational reason for it. At least there wasn't before this latest round of AIDS studies. And even if it makes good medical sense, should we really turn the procedure into a party with sesame bagels and veggie cream cheese?

  My aunts fueled my confusion. I was subjected to dueling campaigns. On the one hand, my Orthodox aunt Kate left voice mails encouraging us to go ahead with it. On the other, Marti sent pamphlets with stomachchurning stories of circumcisions gone bad.

  In the end, Julie put her foot down. Jasper would have a circumcision, and it would be at our apartment, and it would be done by a family friend, Lew Sank, a New Jersey pediatrician who also has mohel credentials.

  When the day came, and the family gathered, I did my best to ignore what was actually happening. I deluded myself into thinking of it as a brunch, with a short detour into some minor medical procedure.

  I distanced myself with jokes. Of which Lew--like all mohels--had plenty.

  "Did you hear the one about the guy who converted to Judaism as an adult? He has to get a circumcision, but he's nervous about it. So he asks his Jewish friend Abe, does it hurt? And Abe says, 'Oy. When I had mine done, I couldn't walk or talk for a year.'"

  The only terrifying moment was when I spotted a knife on the table the size of a small machete. It turned out to be for the cutting of the ceremonial bread. So that, too, turned into something of a joke.

  During Jasper's circumcision, Julie and I refused to watch the actual cutting. We both went into our bedroom and shut the door, and held hands, and talked very loudly about whether the dolphin-themed mobile took AA batteries or C batteries so as to drown out the crying. Two and a half years later, circumcisions two and three are upon me. And despite the existence of bagels and the mohel Lew, these feel different: This time I plan to watch. If I'm choosing to do this to my sons--this, the fifth and final law on my list of Most Perplexing Rules in the Bible--I can at least face up to my choice.

  Circumcision is a huge part of the Bible; it merits eighty-seven mentions. It was seen as the way to seal the covenant between God and humans. A signature in blood. Abraham was the pioneer. God appeared to him and instructed him to circumcise all males in his house, and all newborns after eight days. Abraham had no newborns at the time, so the first inductees were his elder son, Ishmael (who was thirteen years old), and Abraham himself, who was all of ninety-nine years old.

  In the New Testament, circumcision becomes optional, at best. The Apostle Paul--whose mission was to expand the Christian faith beyond the Jewish people--said that circumcision wasn't necessary. You didn't need the physical proof as long as you changed your heart. The phrase he used was circumcised "in the heart." Some passages do indicate that Paul is fine with circumcision for those who are direct descendants of the Israelites.

  "So are you going to do the circumcision yourself?" asks Julie's brother Eric.

  "I hear there are some nice flint rocks in Central Park," adds her other brother, Doug.

  "Very good," I say.

  I'm not in the mood for jokes; I'm too anxious. My forehead is damp.

  I mutter something about how the Bible doesn't mandate that the father perform the ceremony.

  Actually, we're about as far from a flint rock as possible. Lew has come with a case full of gleaming metal equipment, which he's laid out on our dining room table. He snaps on his white surgical gloves, ties on a yellow apron, and pulls out a box of alcohol wipes.

  "Who's first?" asks Lew.

  "Zane?" I say.

  "OK, bring him over."

  He looks so tiny on the table, as small as a soup bowl at a dinner setting.

  I glance around the room. My sister-in-law is staring out the window. My mom is flipping through a Thomas the Tank Engine brochure. Julie has her back to the table. No one is looking at Zane.

  I gaze back at my son, who has started to cry. A bus rumbles by in the background. My teeth are clenched. I'm squinting, some sort of compromise between open and closed eyes.

  Lew attaches some clamps. More crying. He takes out a brown leather strap. And scalpels. Drops of blood stain the towel. Zane is now wailing, openmouthed.

  In a sense, it's all very hygienic, medical, sanitized. And yet . . . nothing can disguise the fact that what is happening on that table is deeply primitive. It's the most primitive thing I've seen in my entire biblical year.

  There, on a patch of white gauze, is a piece of my son. He has sacrificed a part of his body to join an ancient community. Lew reads a prayer from a xeroxed sheet of paper. "May He who blessed our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses and Aaron, David and Solomon, bless this tender infant . . ."

  These are no longer just meaningless names. These are the men I'd spent my year with. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. This was a chain that--if Lew continued spouting names for several hours--would presumably reach Charles Jacobowitz and Arnold Jacobs and A. J. Jacobs. Who am I to break thousands of years of tradition? Circumcision is a crazy, irrational ritual. But here's the thing: It's my heritage's crazy, irrational ritual. So maybe I shouldn't dismiss it.

  So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. --MATTHEW 7:12

  Day 372. A few days ago, right before Labor Day weekend, the hallway outside our apartment began to smell.

  "It's like rotten turnips," Julie said. "You smell it, don't you?"

  I did, but told Julie it was probably nothing. Our mysterious neighbor in 5R--a woman I've never met--loves to cook exotic dishes made from animals unknown. This was probably just a recipe gone awry. But the smell didn't fade by morning. Julie called the building staff; they "checked it out" and found nothing. Over Labor Day, our neighbors all left Manhattan. The building was empty except for me, Julie, our kids, and that smell. Which got worse. And worse. You couldn't tell where it was coming from--it seemed to soak the hall.

  When Julie and I would go out for a walk, we'd dart from our apartment to the elevator, our mouths and noses covered with our shirt collars. Julie called the maintenance staff again. They promised to look into it.

  On Tuesday morning, I woke up to banging in the hallway. I opened our door a crack and peeked out. The building handyman, Victor, was outside apartment 5I--the one owned by our sweet hippie neighbor Nancy--trying to pry open her front door with a hammer. I could hear Nancy's dog barking. Four medics lingered nearby, occasionally clicking their walkie-talkies and speaking in low voices.

  I knew before one of the medics asked me that question: "Have you seen your neighbor in the last few days?"

  It took Victor a half hour of pounding before he broke down the door. He went in, reemerging a few minutes later.

  "Alive?" I asked.

  He shook his head.

  They wheeled Nancy's body out on a stretcher covered with a sheet. They snapped a padlock on the door, along with yellow police tape ribbon and a Day-Glo sticker warning people not to even consider trying to come inside. They brought an industrial strength fan at the end of the hall to clear the smell.
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  I told Julie when she woke up. She sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands and didn't talk for what seemed like two full minutes. Finally she looked up, her eyes red.

  "I saw her a week ago and she was all worried about me and how I was holding up."

  I just shook my head.

  "What'd she die of?"

  "They don't know yet."

  "I told them there was a smell," said Julie. "I told them. This is what I was afraid of."

  Whenever something happens, I always try to think of a biblical precedent, a story that will help me put it into perspective. But with Nancy's death, there is none, really. The Bible doesn't talk much about living and dying in solitude. Adam starts out alone, but God doesn't let that last long: "It is not good for a man to be alone." In biblical times, the smallest unit of society wasn't the individual. It was the family. Nancy had no family, no husband, no children, just a handful of friends, few of whom she saw very often.

  That night, Julie and I lie in bed, too spent to do much reading.

  "Maybe we could . . . say a prayer."

  Julie looks at me like I had just proposed a threeway with the waitress at Columbus Bakery.

  "You serious?"

  "A prayer of thanksgiving. I find them helpful. We don't have to call it a prayer. We just give thanks."

  Julie paused. "OK."

  "Maybe we'll start out simply."

  "I'm thankful for our health and our kids," Julie says. "I'm thankful we got to know Nancy," I say.

  "I'm thankful you're ending your project soon."

  The memorial service is held a couple of days later. It's in the apartment of a woman who knew Nancy just a little bit--they were both members of the building's informal dog owners' clique. Since Nancy had no family, Julie did most of the organizing, tracking down her few friends, posting a notice in the lobby.

  About ten people show up. Her high-school friend Dan reads letters she'd written over the years, painfully honest notes about her loneliness and how she still has "the bends" after emerging from the sixties. We pass around the album cover she designed for Jimi Hendrix. Several people say something along the lines of: "She had a troubled life, but at least she found some peace at the end with her dog Memphis."

  And we talk about the crushing irony, a twist that sounded like it was out of a Chekhov play but was true: She died of heart failure and asthma. The asthma was brought on by her dog.

  If you try to literally follow Leviticus 19:18--"You shall love your neighbor as yourself"--well, you can't. That would mean putting your neighbor's dreams, career, children, pets, and finances on par with your own. This is why it's usually reinterpreted in the less extreme--but infinitely wise--version known as the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."

  While she was alive, I didn't do so well with the Golden Rule and Nancy. Here she was, my literal neighbor. Two doors down. And I had made a half-assed effort. I never invited her to dinner. I never rolled up my sleeves and helped her get her Jimi Hendrix book published. I never bought her a gift to repay her for the ones she bought Jasper. I never fulfilled my mission to do a mitzvah for her.

  I got my chance to partially redeem myself. Nancy's beagle Memphis still wasn't adopted. He had a temporary home at another neighbor's apartment, but that family couldn't keep him long. So the next day I began a frantic quest: Find Memphis a home, and in so doing, make myself feel less powerless.

  I clicked on to craigslist to put up a dog-adoption notice. But while there, I read a notice from the ASPCA. It warned of psychos who adopt dogs and then, for amusement, shoot them or toss them in the river. This didn't help my mood. Instead, I sent an email blast to everyone I could think of. I included a photo of Memphis. I had snapped the photo earlier in the day--the dog was born with a droopy face, but now it was positively dragging on the ground. Will anyone adopt such a forlorn-looking mutt?

  A friend of a friend responded. He wanted to meet the forlorn dog. He came over, dressed in a suit and tie, his wife and children in tow.

  "Let's think about it," said his wife, as the kids scratched Memphis's head.

  She may have had a prudent idea. But the kids weren't about to wait, so just like that, Memphis was off to a suburban house with a yard and a porch.

  The next day I felt like I'd at least done something Nancy would have liked. But I also flashed back to a question Nancy asked me months ago:

  Did I help because the Bible told me to, or because I really wanted to?

  Did I find the dog a new home as a pat and tidy way to quantify some moral progress for my book? Quite possibly.

  I consulted one of my spiritual advisers about this--Greg Fryer, a Lutheran minister who lives in my parents' building. He told me the following:

  "C. S. Lewis said the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive." In short, pretending to be better than you are is better than nothing. Not only was this a great quote, but it also included dog imagery, so I thought it must be fated. I thanked Rev. Fryer and C. S. Lewis for letting my conscience off the hook.

  A few days later three men in white Hazmat suits came to clear out Nancy's apartment. They had stuffed everything--her clothes, her frying pans, her papers--into black plastic garbage bags, about a dozen of which lined the hall. And they were just getting started.

  I tied a red bandana to my face, put on some yellow dishwashing gloves, and stepped past them into the apartment.

  "Just looking for something real quick," I said before they could ask for identification or permits.

  I wove my way through the mess on the floor, and there, on a table in the corner, I found a stack of papers. I flipped through it. It was a very rough draft of her memoir. I took it.

  "Thanks!" I said as I walked out.

  When I got back to my apartment, I sat on my couch and read the handwritten pages. It's a tough but lovely book. It's also highly unfinished, sometimes with but a sentence fragment scribbled on top of a page. I don't know if it'll ever get published. I hope so. But in case it doesn't, here's a sentence on page forty-one that stopped me short. It is about her sketch of Jimi Hendrix, the one that became the cover to one of his albums.

  "Eventually, I sold the original to the Hard Rock Cafe, not only because I needed a little money, but because I was afraid that, if I would die, it would be put on the street, like all stuff is put on the street when people die, in a black plastic bag. Now it was safe."

  . . . It was in my mouth as sweet as honey. --EZEKIEL 3:3

  Day 374. My niece Natalia is having her bat mitzvah in New Jersey today. As you probably know, the most important part of a modern bar or bat mitzvah isn't the Torah portion or lighting the candles, it's the theme. You've got to have a theme: sports, Camelot, whatever. I recently went to a bar mitzvah called Zach Wars: Revenge of the Torah, which seemed at odds with Leviticus's ban on vengeance. Natalia's theme is Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

  She and her mom have gone all out. The invitations were wrapped around a chocolate bar. Her mom spent weeks making twenty-two papier-mache Oompa Loompas. Bowls of Skittles and M&M's cover the tables.

  Jasper is getting fidgety, so I carry him onto the dance floor, where we joined all the thirteen-year-old classmates and sixty-eight-year-old cousins twice removed. We are dancing to some Beyonce song, and I feel something happen. I feel something envelop me and then envelop Jasper. And then I feel it keep going. I feel it spread out like a drop of cranberry juice in a glass of water, sweeping through the room, swallowing my nieces and nephew and Julie and my parents. Here I am, at this gloriously silly ritual, surrounded by giant Twizzlers and Milk Duds, my defenses down, and this feeling has seeped out of my brain through my skull and filled the room. And kept going. For all I know, it has swept out the doors and windows and into the parking lot and through the driveway.

  I'd had some close calls this year. There was that hypnotic trance while watching the
serpent-handling preacher. But I've never fully let myself go, always hovering a few feet above ground like a hot-air balloon still stuck to its tether.

  So at this suburban Jersey country club, my son's hands locked around my neck, his head pressed against my shoulder, I chose to accept this feeling and ride it to the end. To surrender. If I had to label it, I'd say the feeling is part love, part gratefulness, part connectedness, part joy. And that joy was like joy concentrate, far more intense and warmer than what I felt that night of dancing with the Hasidim. Maybe now I've finally felt what King David felt when he danced before the Lord. During those moments, nothing could have bothered me. If my garments flew up around my waist like King David's did, it wouldn't have mattered. At least to me. The joy would steamroll right on through.

  My altered state only lasted all of ten seconds. Maybe less. And then it faded away. But not totally. There's still some background radiation--which I hope to God stays for weeks, months.

  Driving back to New York, I ask myself, why did that just happen? Did it have something to do with my frazzled state after Nancy's death? Maybe. Was it because my project is about to end, and I forced myself into the state? Yeah, probably. But even if it was manufactured, it was still real. Farm-bred salmon is better than no salmon at all. Or to put it another way: My year was a controlled experiment, but sometimes experiments produce results precisely because they create extreme circumstances. If Gregor Mendel (a monk, incidentally) had let his pea pods grow willy-nilly, he never would have understood genetics.