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

by A. J. Jacobs

  No, I’ve got to think good thoughts: Julie’s pregnant.

  raccoon

  It washes its food before eating. My new favorite animal.

  raspberry

  Our friends Paul and Lisa are staying the weekend—they live in Washington these days. Paul tells us over dinner that he just got in an argument with his uncle over the definition of a fruit.

  I have to break it to Paul: his uncle was right. A fruit is, botanically speaking, anything with seeds. So yes, tomatoes are fruit. Paul is no shlub, intellectually speaking—he graduated from Yale Law School—but for some reason, he has never heard the widespread classic about tomatoes being a fruit.

  But that’s baby stuff. I know something that will really freak him out.

  “What about this one,” I ask Paul. “Is a strawberry a berry?”

  Yes…he ventures.

  “Nope. A strawberry is not a berry. Neither is a blackberry or a raspberry.”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re aggregate fruits. Aggregate fruits.” I repeat this as if I am a professor and Paul is taking notes for a quiz. “So what is a berry?” I continue in my postdoctoral tone. “I’ll tell you. A banana is a berry. So is an orange. So is a pumpkin.”

  Paul is, in fact, impressed, if a little confused. So what’s the definition of a berry?

  “Botanically speaking, a berry requires a single ovary with lots of seeds,” I say.

  At this point, I am hoping they will stop asking questions, because I have reached the frontier of my knowledge about berries.

  “How do you tell if it’s a single ovary?” asks Julie.

  “Very carefully,” I say. Ancient joke, as old as the Fig Tree chert fossil from South Africa (3.1 billion years old, the oldest on record). But I don’t know what else to say.

  “That’s insane,” says Paul. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just change the definition of ‘berry’? I mean, it’s gone beyond any usefulness. A pumpkin as a berry? What about eighteen-wheel trucks—are they berries?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “What about tables and chairs? Are they berries?

  “No, I believe those are legumes,” I say.

  The truth can be controversial.

  Rasputin

  An illiterate peasant, Rasputin rose to become a powerful mystic and adviser to the Russian czar and the czarina. It was his death, though, that struck me most. Rasputin was well hated by the aristocrats in the czar’s inner circle, who resented the sway he had over the czarina (she believed Rasputin knew how to treat her son’s hemophilia). In 1905, a group of conspirators decided to murder him. And what a murder it was. This was a man who did not go gentle into that good night. First, Rasputin was given poisoned wine and tea cakes. That didn’t kill him. So a frantic conspirator shot him. Still Rasputin didn’t die—he collapsed, got up again, and ran out into the courtyard. There, another conspirator shot him again. Not dead yet. Finally, the conspirators bound Rasputin and threw him through a hole in the ice into the river, where he finally died by drowning (they hoped).

  His was among the more unusual expirings. But just one of dozens, hundreds, thousands I’ve read about over the months. I’ve read about blues singer Robert Johnson, who died after drinking strychnine-laced whiskey in a juke joint. And Marie Blanchard, an aviation pioneer who died when her hot air balloon was set ablaze by fireworks. Explorer David Livingstone died of hemorrhoids(!); poet Henry Longfellow’s wife’s dress caught on fire; the Greek philosopher Peregrinus Proteus threw himself into the flames of the Olympic Games; the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in his bath by a female assassin. Samuel Johnson said, “The frequent contemplation of death is necessary to moderate the passions.” Well, be assured: my passions are quite moderate. I know that at any minute I could leave the building for a whole number of reasons. I could keel over from uremic poisoning, like Jean Harlow. Or slightly less likely, but still within the realm of possibility, I could be thrown out of my window by eunuchs and then eaten by dogs, like the Bible’s Jezebel. It’s memento mori after memento mori.

  But then there’s the biggest memento mori of them all: when someone in your family dies. We got a call a couple of days ago from Julie’s mom that her aunt Marcia had passed away. Today was the funeral.

  I didn’t know Marcia well—maybe met her three times—but I learned from the speeches at the memorial service that hers was an extraordinary life, with a childhood spent under the floorboards of a chicken coop in Poland, hiding from the Nazis. All the speeches had the same theme: Marcia was a giver. When Marcia was sick in the hospital with cancer that was eating away at her body, a friend called with some troubles; Marcia asked how she could help the friend. Or more precisely whispered it, because she was in such pain she couldn’t talk. It reminds me of that Horace Mann quote: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Marcia seemed to have won some victories for humanity. Nothing on an epic scale, but small victories, every day.

  After the service, we drove out to the cemetery in Long Island, alternately tailing and losing the hearse in traffic. When we got there, we all took a silent turn with the shovel, tossing a couple of heaps of cinnamon-colored dirt onto a pine box at the bottom of the grave. Nothing will make you contemplate death like the soft thud of earth on a coffin. It’s such a final sound, that thud. That thud is worth a thousand entries about death.

  We drove back to Manhattan to sit shiva. In the car, the dings in my mind continued as always—Bavarian corpse cakes are a food placed on dead bodies to soak up the deceased’s goodness—but they were faint and hollow, and I mostly ignored them. When we got to Julie’s uncle apartment on the Upper West Side, I busied myself by making two huge urns of coffee. I shoveled scoops of coffee into the filter, the soft thud reminding me of the other soft thud at the grave site. But the coffee project made me feel better. I needed to keep busy. I’m addicted to work, whether it’s reading the Britannica or making coffee. And at least this work provided a clear, caffeinated benefit to others.

  After a couple of hours, we said good-bye. We had another rite of passage to attend. My sister, the night before, had given birth to a seven-pound baby girl, Isabella, at Cornell Medical Center. It’s a nice twofer for my parents, Julie’s pregnancy and Beryl’s delivery.

  When we got to the hospital, Beryl’s husband, Willy, was cradling Isabella in his arms while Beryl ate yogurt in the bed, tired but giddy. The birth wasn’t easy—Beryl had a cesarean section. But still, Isabella was healthy.

  “She looks like an old Chinese man,” said Beryl. It’s kind of true. She does look like she’d be at home in an opium den or paging through Mao’s Little Red Book—but she’s an adorable, gorgeous old Chinese man.

  It was a weird day—death and birth. And at the end of it, when I got home, I couldn’t bring myself to read a single page of the Britannica.

  razor

  Prehistoric ones were made of clamshells and sharks’ teeth. Egyptian razors were made of gold, which probably cost slightly more than my Mach 3, but not much.

  Reed, Walter

  I recognized Walter Reed from the famous hospital that bears his name. But I didn’t know he was the man who solved the yellow fever mystery. During the Spanish-American War, when hundreds of soldiers were dying of yellow fever, Reed went down to Cuba to try to figure out how the disease was spread. Previous suspicions had focused on infected bed-sheets and uniforms. But some scientists—including Reed—now thought insects were the culprits. Reed eventually proved yellow fever was indeed transmitted by mosquitoes, thus saving hundreds, thousands, who knows how many lives. Which is great. He deserves much praise.

  But I think at least a couple of smaller hospitals should bear the names James Carroll and Jesse Lazear. These long-forgotten men were the two scientists who worked with Reed and who volunteered to be bitten by infected mosquitoes. Carroll suffered a severe attack and survived; Lazear died. It’s one thing to come up with a scientific theory, it’
s another altogether to get yourself dosed with a fatal disease to help prove it. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like for Carroll and Lazear. What went through their minds when they stuck out their arms and let those little fiends feast on their blood? On the one hand, they no doubt wanted the mosquito hypothesis to be true—but on the other hand, if the hypothesis was true, they’d have a fatal disease coursing through their veins. These were great, brave men.

  religion

  I didn’t grow up with an overabundance of religion. I’m officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way that the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. Which is to say, not very Jewish at all.

  I never saw the inside of a Hebrew school, had no bar mitzvah, and wouldn’t know a gefilte fish if it bit me on the finger. Until recently, my family celebrated Christmas instead of Hanukkah—though, to be fair, we did sometimes have a Star of David on top of our Christmas tree.

  My family had melted right into that pot. You want to talk assimilation? My family are members of something called the Maidstone Club in East Hampton. This is a club for those who enjoy tennis, golf, speaking with their jaw locked, and debating which of their ancestors stepped onto Plymouth Rock first. This could be the Waspiest organization in America. I can’t swear on it, but I’d guess there are at least five unironically named Muffys on the membership roster. My friend John always urged me to wear a pink-and-green plaid yarmulke to the dining hall, maybe one with whales embroidered around the edges. Sadly I never did.

  Perhaps my closest brush with true Judaism came via a girlfriend, Rachel Zabar. Not that Rachel was particularly religious. She wasn’t. But she was Jewish royalty. Her father owned Zabar’s delicatessen, the most famous Jewish deli in the world, the white-hot center of whitefish.

  Everyone said the same thing: “Bet you get a lot of free lox. Eh? Eh?” Then they’d elbow me in the ribs, thinking they were making a very original sexual innuendo. Yes, I did get free lox. I also got to attend a Zabar seder, where both of the Zabar brothers—Rachel’s father and her uncle—brought matzoh from their respective stores, and you had to choose your allegiance by which matzoh you ate.

  In any case, that—and watching Woody Allen movies—is about as religious as I’ve gotten. As for my belief system, thanks to my relatively God-free upbringing, I’m agnostic. The word “agnostic”, by the way, was coined by the great and honorable evolutionary thinker T. H. Huxley, who died in 1895, fittingly, midway through a defense of agnosticism. Agnostics like to point out that there’s no empirical evidence for or against God. In fact, it’s impossible to even conceive of the evidence that would convince a true agnostic. The Britannica asks readers to imagine thousands of people are watching the night sky, and the stars suddenly rearrange themselves to spell out the word “God.” Would that constitute evidence? The Britannica says no. But let me tell you, if that happened, I’d be in a temple strapping on tefillin before you could say “potato kugel.”

  But as of this writing, the stars haven’t spelled out “God”, or even something close, like “Thou shalt not kill,” or “Never pay retail.” So I’m left to ponder these things without definite proof. I’m probably just rationalizing my own beliefs, but the Britannica does seem to offer support for agnosticism. You read about dozens and hundreds of religions, all claiming to be the one true religion. And you get scientific explanations for biblical miracles—the rivers of blood during Moses’ time were probably the result of excessive heavy rains mixing with the red soil and red algae of North Africa.

  The Britannica, at least, has made me feel less egregiously ignorant about the religion I was born into. It’s been an excellent substitute for Hebrew school. Finally, I know what this Purim is. I know who Esther is, and I know that a haftarah is not half a Torah, which I actually thought it was.

  Do I consider myself more Jewish after reading all this Judaica? Yes and no. I’ve found more reasons to be impressed with Judaism than I anticipated. I’ve also found more things that I really dislike about my religion. In the spirit of Talmudic dialogue, I figured I should talk my learning over with a three-dimensional rabbi.

  A friend’s rabbi agrees to see me. He has asked me to meet him at that well-known center of Semitic studies, the Au Bon Pain in Greenwich Village. When I arrive, I couldn’t be happier with the way he looks. His chin sports a long gray beard, about the size of a cafeteria tray. Very rabbinical. It reminds me of the facial hair I’ve seen in pictures next to 19th-century people in the Britannica. Perhaps Theodor Herzl? The rabbi is wearing a tweed jacket, big wire-rim glasses, and a yellow tie.

  I get a sesame bagel, which I figure is appropriate. The rabbi just has some coffee. We start with some small talk about our mutual friend, but he soon cuts us off. “Well, I could schmooze you all day, but I know your time is short,” says the rabbi. “Why don’t we get to your questions?”

  Straight to business. I like that.

  I figure I should ease into our debate—give him a couple of things I like about Judaism before attacking my own millennia-old heritage. I tell him I admire Judaism’s love of scholarship. I quote the Britannica, which says that scholarship in Judaism is an “ethical good.”

  The rabbi nods his head, his beard bobbing up and down right above the table’s surface.

  “It’s more than an ethical good,” he says. “It’s a tool for survival. The emphasis on telling a story—that’s one way to express yourself Jewishly.”

  I’ve never heard Judaism used as an adverb, but I liked it.

  I next praise Ecclesiastes.

  “What do you like about it?” he asks.

  I get nervous, as if I am going to fail his test. I babble as Jewishly as I can. I say that I think Ecclesiastes is wise and true: you can’t be guaranteed of anything, so you should enjoy the good things that God has provided.

  He agrees it is wise—I have passed the test! “We shouldn’t be focused on the completing of a task. When you’re going from A to Z, if you make it to Z, great. But if you don’t, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure.”

  “Very appropriate,” I say.

  He smiles wisely. “Some Orthodox Jews read a page of the Talmud every day. After seven years, they complete their study, and there’s a big celebration at Madison Square Garden. You know what they do the next day? They go back to page one.”

  Dear Lord. I hope I don’t go back to a-ak when I finish this.

  “Another thing I like about Judaism is that there’s very little ascetism,” I say. This is something I read way back in the As and it had stuck with me.

  When I bring up ascetism, the rabbi embarks on a long verbal detour about Cain and Abel and participating in the community. It is a little off the point I am trying to make. I am trying to say that I think it is cool that Judaism allows you to have sex. But now that seems a bit too sleazy a point to pursue. So I decide to change the topic.

  “Okay, now to the things I don’t like about Judaism,” I say.

  “Okay,” says the rabbi.

  “Well, there’s halitza,” I say.

  “Halitza?”

  “Yes, you know, halitza. According to the Bible, if a woman’s husband dies, she must marry his brother. Halitza is what the widow must do to get out of the marriage. The widow pulls a sandal off her brother-in-law’s foot and spits in his face.”

  “I know what halitza is. What’s your question?”

  “My question is, well, don’t you think that’s crazy? I mean, first requiring a woman to marry her dead husband’s brother. That’s crazy. And then with the sandal and the spitting?”

  “I’m still not sure what you’re getting at,” says the rabbi.

  His tone isn’t offended, just confused. I realize my question wasn’t the best phrased in the history of Jewish debate. So I try to explain again: halitza is a bizarre and unsavory ritual, one I could never support, and it comes straight from the Bible. Since other Jewish rituals—circumcision, Passover—come from the same source, why should I give them any more validity
?

  The rabbi nods his head and stays silent for a solid fifteen seconds. Either I’ve made him think, which would be good, or I’ve really ticked him off.

  “First, halitza is not practiced anymore.”

  “That’s good,” I say.

  “We don’t practice it because it’s demeaning to human beings. You have to distinguish between rituals that are demeaning to human beings versus rituals that are life-affirming.”

  A good point, and a distinction that seems reasonable. And yet, Jews—like those in all religions—still seem to practice many non-life-affirming rituals. In the Orthodox synagogues, for instance, men and women are not allowed to sit together. That, to me, doesn’t seem life-affirming.

  “Have you ever heard of the two rabbis Shammai and Hillel?” asks the rabbi.

  I shake my head.

  “These were two famous rabbis, and they disagreed about everything. One said the mezuzah should go horizontal, the other thought it should go vertical. Which is why it’s diagonal to this day. Anyway, a man went to Shammai and said, ‘Tell me about Judaism while standing on one foot.’ Shammai said, ‘Get out of here.’ So the man went to Hillel and asked the same thing. Hillel stood on one foot and said, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the essence of Judaism. All the rest is commentary.’ ”

  I like that story. It’s a story told well and Jewishly, a fine conclusion to my Talmudic debate.

  My conversation with the rabbi lasted a couple hours—admittedly not quite equivalent to several years at Hebrew school, but longer than I’d ever spent one-on-one with a religious figure. At the end, I’m still agnostic. And yet, there is wisdom in Judaism—so I’ll just pick and choose the parts I like and hope I don’t go to Jewish hell (known officially as Gehenna). I’ll choose to follow the Golden Rule. I’ll choose Ecclesiastes. I’ll choose to go to seder, but more to be with my family than because I find the ritual meaningful. I’ll choose to stay married to Julie, who knows all the Jewish rituals cold, and who will give our kid a proper dose of ethnic identity.