by A. J. Jacobs
“The courtyard isn’t accessible to anyone except one apartment.”
“Which apartment?”
“It’s not going to work. You can’t build a hut in the courtyard.”
So I go to my backup plan: building the hut in our living room. This is not ideal for two reasons. The first reason is that it’s a hut in our living room.
The second is that my hut—called a sukkah, in Hebrew—wouldn’t pass muster with even the most laid-back go-with-the-flow rabbi in America. The rabbis say huts must be built outside, and conform to dozens of other rules as well. This time of year, approved sukkahs sprout up all over West Side roofs.
“Wouldn’t it be easier just to use the sukkah on the roof of the Jewish community center?” Julie asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “But I’d feel like I was cheating.”
I explain to Julie that I’m on a solo mission to find the core of the Bible. I am a lone adventurer. I must blaze my own path.
“OK, but it sounds like you’re making work for yourself.”
She’s got a point. My day starts with a trek down to a store called Metropolitan Lumber to pick up a dozen two-by-fours, a handful of cinder blocks, and some canvas. I begin to feel better about the project. There’s something satisfying about buying lumber. It makes me feel like a guy who builds porches and rec rooms and uses words like drywall.
Next I sling my duffel bag over my shoulder and hike off to Riverside Park. I need some more materials. The Bible instructs us to get “the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook.” (In biblical times, these might have been used to build the huts, though the longstanding Jewish tradition is to wave them in the air.)
As I walk through New York’s version of nature, I stuff my bag full of leafy boughs and willows. I buy a palm plant the size of a volleyball and a Middle Eastern lemonlike fruit called an etrog (traditionally thought to be the fruit in question). It feels good. I’m accomplishing stuff. I’m sweating.
At 11:00 a.m., back in my apartment, I begin hammering crossbeams and holding nails in my mouth and sweating a lot more. Three hours later, thanks to the simpleton’s blueprint I downloaded off the internet, I actually have the skeleton of a bona fide hut. Which promptly collapses like it’s in a Buster Keaton movie and smashes into the wall. I start again, and this time add extra struts, and this time it stays up.
“Oh my God,” Julie says when she arrives home.
I ask her if she’s annoyed.
“A little. But more stunned that you actually built something. It’s enormous.”
Julie inspects my hut. It’s got four wooden poles topped by a big sheet of white canvas that just grazes our apartment’s ceiling. The interior is spare but decorated with boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook. She squeezes between the hut and the radiator to get another view. She eyes the cinder blocks, making sure that they didn’t scratch the floor.
The Bible says to dwell in the hut, so I plan to dwell as much as possible—eat my meals in my hut, read my books there, sleep there. I invite Julie along, but she says she’ll let me “fly solo on this one.”
So that night, at eleven-thirty, I spread three blankets out on the wood floor. I lie down, put my hands behind my head, stare at the draped canvas, breathe in the citrus and willows (which smell like something they’d rub into you during a massage at Bliss Spa), and try to figure out what I’m feeling.
First, I realize, I’m still on a high from building the hut. I put the thing up myself. Bertrand Russell—the famously agnostic philosopher—said there are two kinds of work in this world: altering the position of matter on earth, and telling other people to alter the position of matter on earth. I like doing the former. I like breaking the stereotype of the physically inept Jew, at least for a day.
My elation is tainted with guilt, though. This sukkah is way too comfortable. This is supposed to remind me of the ancient huts in the desert, but here I am in a climate-controlled apartment—no sand, no wind, and no lack of food. I don’t have to worry about the freezing nights or blistering days or plagues, which killed forty thousand of the six hundred thousand Israelites.
But that guilt, in turn, is relieved by this epiphany: This holiday is all about living biblically. God, if He exists, is ordering everyone—not just those with a book contract—to travel back in time and try to experience the world of the ancient Middle East. God created “immersion journalism,” as my friend calls it. Maybe God approves of my project after all.
He who is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.
—PROVERBS 14:29
Day 50. I’ve noticed that a lot of biblical living is about constant reminders. That’s the purpose of the tassels I’ve safety pinned to my shirt—the Bible says they are to remind me of the commandments, like a biblical version of the string around the finger.
In the spirit of reminders, I’ve taped a list to my bathroom mirror. It’s my Most Violated List. We’ll see if it helps; it’s worth a try. The list includes the following classics:
Lying. Most recent violation: I told my friend I’d return his book about prayer very soon, when in fact I’d lost it.
Vanity. I check my temples every day for signs of hair loss.
Gossip. Julie and I talked about how her brother Doug still wears these loud, multicolored sweaters right out of The Cosby Show.
Coveting. I did a signing at a book fair a few days ago, and at the next table was Anthony Bourdain, the rakish celebrity chef/author. My table got such visitors as: my mother, my father, my wife, my son. Meanwhile the line in front of Bourdain’s table resembled opening night of The Phantom Menace, though without as many Darth Maul costumes.
Touching impure things. Handy Seat aside, it’s just too hard to avoid.
Anger. I gave the finger to an ATM.
You see, the ATM charged me a $1.75 fee for withdrawal. A dollar seventy-five? That’s bananas. So I flipped off the screen. As Julie tells me, when you start making rude gestures to inanimate objects, it’s time to work on your anger issues.
Mine is not the shouting, pulsing-vein-in-the-forehead rage. Like my dad, I rarely raise my voice (again, I like to be emotionally in control at all times). My anger problem is more one of long-lasting resentment. It’s a heap of real or perceived slights that eventually build up into a mountain of bitterness.
Did I really need to get so angry at the juggler at the street fair who stopped juggling to take a cell phone call? And then talked for, like, fifteen minutes while Jasper looked on all eager and hopeful? Yes, it’s annoying, but worse things have happened.
Or what about the guy in Starbucks who monopolized the bathroom for forty-five minutes? (In my defense, he was also wearing a black beret; this was 2006 Manhattan, not 1948 La Rive Gauche.) I was fuming.
And what about the incident at the soup kitchen?
I’ve been volunteering at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Chelsea. It’s an incredible place, the largest soup kitchen in New York, the second-biggest in the country; they serve more than 1,100 meals a day. The man who runs it is a charismatic tough-love leader who I could see commanding a rebellion against the Roman centurions.
And usually, I get a little ethical head rush from working at the soup kitchen. This, I tell myself, is biblical living at its best. I’m following the inspiring words in Deuteronomy 15:7: “If there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren…you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother.”
And yet…even at the soup kitchen, I’m able to find slights.
On my most recent visit, I get assigned to kitchen duty—then immediately demoted. They tell me it’s because of my beard. I understand. No one wants an unpleasant surprise in his rice pilaf. I am fine with it, until I spot some other volunteer working in the kitchen—despite having his face covered with a big bushy beard of his own.
Why the discrepancy?
“Oh, I’m shaving my be
ard tomorrow,” explains my rival volunteer.
Which makes exactly no sense. Does gravity somehow stop working the day before you shave?
I get reassigned to garbage duty. My job is to take the plastic trays from those who have finished lunch, remove the cutlery, bang the trays forcefully against the side of the garbage can—clearing off all the mashed potatoes and string beans—and then hand them to the stacker. I think I am doing a pretty decent job, which is confirmed by the garbage team captain, a guy in a Jets T-shirt who tells me, “Good job.” I am feeling pumped.
Then, after an hour and a half, I’m the victim of a soup kitchen power play. This older guy named Max—he has a droopy face and a permanent scowl—comes up to me, hands me an iced tea in a particularly aggressive manner, and says: “Drink this. Then go away.”
I don’t want iced tea, and I don’t want to go away. I just stare at him.
“Drink this. Then go away,” he repeats, glowering.
As far as I can tell, he is no higher on the volunteer food chain than I am; for reasons unknown, he just wants my garbage duty spot.
The Bible says to respect your elders and do not quarrel. So I leave. But I stew about it for a good two days. Drink this. Then go away. What a bastard.
I’ve been battling my anger since this project started. I want to let go of my resentment. I know it’s healthier, a better way to live. But how to do this when faced with a real-life soup kitchen Nazi? The best biblical inspiration I’ve found is in the book of Jonah. A quick recap for those (like me three months ago) who know only the whale part:
God calls on Jonah to preach to the evil city of Nineveh (now in Iraq). Jonah refuses. He tries to flee God by boarding a ship. This doesn’t work: God creates a mighty tempest, and the frightened sailors throw Jonah overboard. God then sends a whale that swallows Jonah (actually, the Bible says “big fish,” not whale) and spits him safely out onto land.
Chastened, Jonah agrees to go to Nineveh. Jonah preaches there, and it works. More than 120,000 men, women, and children repent. God forgives them.
You’d think Jonah would be happy with God’s forgiveness, but he’s actually angry. He wanted the evil ones smote. He wanted fire and brimstone. He gets so furious at God, he no longer wants to live. God says, “Do you do well to be angry?”
Jonah doesn’t answer but goes off to the outskirts of Nineveh to sulk. So God decides to teach Jonah a lesson: God grows a plant that shields the prophet from the harsh desert sun. Jonah is exceedingly glad. But the very next day, God causes a worm to kill the plant. Once again, Jonah is exposed to the harsh sun and gets very angry. Again, God asks Jonah: “Do you do well to be angry?”
God then drives home his point: Jonah lost his temper over a plant for which he “did not labor” and which lasted but a day. God says, “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals.” In other words, get some perspective.
So that’s what I try to do. I ask myself the question God asked Jonah. “Do you do well to be angry?” I ask it out loud to myself. No, I don’t, I answer. So I got elbowed aside by a strangely competitive soup kitchen volunteer. The world will not end.
I should remember the modern-day Ninevehs where thousands of lives are in danger—the crowd of homeless out the door at Holy Apostles, for instance, or pretty much anywhere in East Africa.
There is such a thing as biblically acceptable anger—righteous indignation. Moses gets angry at the Israelites for worshipping a false idol. Jesus gets angry at the money changers for profaning the Temple. The key is to pump up your righteous anger and mute your petty resentment. I’ll be happy if I can get that balance to fifty-fifty.
David danced before the Lord with all his might…
—2 SAMUEL 6:14
Day 55. It’s the night of October 25, and I’m at the loudest, rowdiest, most drunken party of my life. Me and several hundred Hasidic men.
I came for the dancing. There’s a part in the Bible where King David celebrates the arrival of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem. This was an older David, years after he slew Goliath with a rock and sling. He has defeated his increasingly paranoid mentor Saul to become king of Israel. And he brings home the ark, a sacred box containing the Ten Commandments. He celebrates by dancing. And, man, does he dance. He dances with such abandon, with such joy, that he doesn’t notice that his robe is flying up, exposing his nakedness to the young handmaidens in the kingdom.
His uptight wife, Michal, is appalled. She makes the mistake of scolding King David, and, as a result, is cursed with childlessness.
The unhappy ending seems unduly harsh. But I do love the image of the king doing a wild holy jig. The joy of religion; that’s what David was feeling, and that’s something I underestimated—or pretty much ignored—in my secular life. I want to feel what David felt, so I took a subway to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on a Tuesday evening.
The occasion is a Jewish holiday called Simchas Torah, the last night before the sukkah is taken down. It’s not in the Bible proper, but it does celebrate something biblical: the end to the annual reading of the five books of Moses. And it sounded too interesting to miss.
My guide, Gershon, is a friend of a friend. He’s a kind, bespectacled, newlywed Hasid whose outgoing voice-mail message says: “Your next action could change the world, so make it a good one.”
As we walk, I get to see a side of ultra-Orthodox Jews that I’d never seen before. They always look so somber on the subway, so purposeful. But here they are, well, wasted. They’re weaving down the sidewalks, some holding bottles of Crown Royal whiskey, some singing loudly in Hebrew.
On this holiday, it’s not just OK to drink, it’s pretty much mandatory. Gershon and I go to his parents’ house and pound a few shots of vodka in their front-yard sukkah. It’s raining, and the raindrops fall through the gaps in the sukkah roof and splash into our glasses.
When Gershon says the prayers in Hebrew before drinking, I sneak a peek at him. His eyes are half-closed, his eyelids fluttering, his eyeballs rolled toward the back of his head. Will I ever come close to that spiritual state? Will I get my longed-for epiphany? I’m worried that I won’t.
After our vodka shots, we head over to the party’s headquarters—the huge building known as 770 Eastern Parkway, the nerve center of this branch of Hasidism. (The sect is called Lubavitchers, and its members are the least insular of the Hasidic Jews, committed to bringing unaffiliated Jews into the fold.)
I’m wearing black pants and a black sweater to better blend in with the Hasidim. I forgot to bring the crucial yarmulke, but Gershon lends me one of his.
“We dance for our animal nature,” says Gershon, as we step across the puddles. “The Torah is for both sides of the nature. The reading is for the divine side, and the dancing is for the animal side.”
As we approach within a few yards of 770—as it’s called—Gershon asks me:
“You ever been bungee jumping?”
“No.”
“Well, I have. The instructors say to just jump, don’t think about it. That’s what you have to do here.”
I see what he means. Just getting inside is going to be an extreme sport. The doors are glutted with dozens of revelers in their black coats—all men, no women (the Hasidim aren’t much for gender mixing). We have to elbow our way through.
A fat, red-bearded guy comes up to Gershon and hugs him. Red Beard goes off on a drunken I-love-you-man, you-are-the-greatest-guy-I-know rant that lasts a good two minutes.
Gershon finally extracts himself.
“Who was that?” I ask.
“Never met him before in my life.”
We squeeze our way inside. And there, an ocean of undulating black hats. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them in a hall the size of a large gymnasium. It’s as loud as any concert I’ve ever been to. But instead of drums and guitar, it’s a village of men singing Ay yi yi
yi.
The floor is exactly like a Seattle mosh pit circa 1992. Everyone’s bumping, smacking, thumping into one another. One guy barrels into me so hard that he sends me stumbling. “Hey you with the beard!” he says. Everyone looks up. He unleashes a deep laugh.
We are making a slow, huge circle, sort of a Holy Roller derby. If you look up, you can see the occasional Hasid bouncing up in the air like a pogo stick. When there is a patch of free space on the floor—which isn’t often—a reveler will do a somersault. Two men are swapping their black hats repeatedly as if they were reenacting a Laurel and Hardy scene.
I tell you, I’ve never seen such pure joy. It is thick, atmospheric, like someone had released a huge canister of nitrous oxide into the room. Here we are, hundreds of dancing King Davids. Even for a control freak like me, there’s no choice but to go along with it. You are overwhelmed. You follow the sweaty, bouncing, shouting, ay-yi-yi-ing hordes, or you are trampled.
I swing from emotion to emotion: terror that I’ll be crushed, fascination that humans act this way, paranoia that they’ll deal with the interloper in a manner I’d never forget (think Deliverance meets Yentl). But occasionally I swing to delirious happiness. I don’t know if I feel God. And it isn’t as intense as the epiphanies I had as a kid. But a couple of times that night, I feel something transcendent, something that melts away the future and the past and the deadlines and the MasterCard bills and puts me squarely in the moment. At least for a few seconds, there is no difference between me and Jacob, my biblical alter ego.
After three hours of dancing—at one in the morning—I tell Gershon that I’m going to go, even though the hardcore dancers stay on till six. He walks me out. “Remember,” he says to me as we shake hands goodbye on the street corner, “sometimes you have to look beyond the weirdness. It’s like the temple in ancient Jerusalem. If you went there, you’d see oxen being slaughtered and all sorts of things. But look beyond the weirdness, to what it means.”
As I ride the subway home, with the Ay-yi-yi-ing still echoing in my ears, I try to think of the meaning beyond the weirdness. Here’s what I decide: Underneath my repression, maybe I have a closeted mystical side. Maybe I’m a rational Presbyterian on the outside, but an emotional Baptist on the inside. Given the right circumstances, maybe everyone is, even Henry Kissinger.