by A. J. Jacobs
The next morning, I tell Julie about my wild night of dancing with Hasidic men and how I got a taste of pure joy.
“And where were the women during this thing?”
“Well, they were watching. They have these observation windows.”
“Observation windows?” Julie looks pissed.
It’s strange. Naturally, I noticed the gender segregation—but there were so many odd and overwhelming things about the night that I didn’t laser in on that one. It’s the obliviousness that comes with being in the majority.
“Yeah,” I say. “Well, I was trying not to be judgmental.”
“Well, seems like they’re being judgmental of women.”
I can sense Julie becoming more and more skeptical of religion, or at least hardcore religion.
Before my project, Julie was the mildly proreligion one in the family. She believed in a God of some sort, or at least a universe that wasn’t morally apathetic. “Things happen for a reason,” she was always telling me when I’d moan about some career setback. She loves the rituals of Hanukkah and Passover. She’s already started coming up with themes for Jasper’s bar mitzvah (soccer! The Academy Awards!).
But now, I feel her drawing away—even as I start to warm to some aspects of religious life. It’s the difference between living the Bible and living with someone who is living the Bible.
…He had done so, walking naked and barefoot.
—ISAIAH 20:2
Day 61. I’m typing this right after midnight. The Psalms urge us to rise at midnight and praise God, so I’ve been doing that for a week. I promised Julie I’d do it only for a week, since I’ve had to set an alarm for 11:58 p.m., two hours into her sleep cycle.
It’s the end of my experiment’s second month, and here’s what I’m feeling: exhilarated, confused, overwhelmed, underqualified, fascinated, and scared. Also, embarrassed.
My biblical alter ego Jacob is starting to look freakish. I’ve got tassels hanging from my garments. I take this purity-insuring Handy Seat everywhere. My beard has gone beyond shaggy. It now hangs a good two inches below my chin, and it’s starting to make curlicues and shoot off in unexpected directions. (Julie wanted to go to Halloween with me as Tom Hanks from Cast Away and her as the volleyball, but I can’t do Halloween because it’s a pagan holiday.)
Yes, of course, part of me likes the attention. I write memoirs for a living, for Pete’s sake. And, yes, I know I brought this on myself—no one’s forcing me to follow the Bible at knifepoint. But the constant stares and quizzical looks—it’d be enough to make anyone, even me, self-conscious. A bit paranoid, even.
Luckily, I’ve found inspiration in the Bible. As the Brooklyn rabbi Andy Bachman suggested, I’ve been rereading the Prophets. He’s right. They are amazing.
I love their message of social justice—especially Amos, Micah, and Isaiah. Again and again, they berate the hard-hearted rich who lie on beds of ivory and sip wine contentedly and “trample the heads of the poor into the dust of the earth.” Their days are numbered.
But I also love the way they delivered that message. You see, the prophets didn’t just utter their prophecies. They staged what are known as “prophetic acts”—wild, attention-grabbing, God-inspired pieces of performance art. The prophets were the inventors of street theater, as scholar Marcus Borg points out in his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. They were ancient David Blaines, but with orders from God, not a network executive.
Consider Hosea, who married a prostitute and named his children “Not pitied” and “Not my people.” The names were a warning: Israel must repent for its idolatrous ways, or God will continue to have no pity and cut them off.
Even more radical was Isaiah, who walked naked and barefoot for three years among the people of Jerusalem. (This was symbolic of what would happen if Judah allied itself with Egypt and Ethiopia; they would be conquered, and everyone would end up naked captives.) Another prophet, Jeremiah, did wear clothes but walked the streets with a wooden yoke around his neck to signify the yoke of Babylonian rule.
But eclipsing them all was Ezekiel. He was the master. I knew from reading the encyclopedia that Ezekiel had eaten a scroll to symbolize his appropriation of its message. And yet that was tame compared to his other performances. One time, for instance, God told Ezekiel to carve a model of Jerusalem into a brick, then lie down beside the model on his left side. He continued lying there. For 390 days. Then Ezekiel turned to his right side to lie another forty days. These days were to symbolize the years that Israel and Judah would be in exile after the Babylonian conquering.
During his 430-day feat, Ezekiel was to eat a meager diet of bread—cooked over human dung. Ezekiel pleaded with God, and God agreed to let him use cow dung as fuel instead.
As I enter my third month, Ezekiel and his fellow prophets have become my heroes. They were fearless. They literalized metaphors. They turned their lives into protest pieces. They proved that, in the name of truth, sometimes you can’t be afraid to take a left turn from polite society and look absurd.
Maybe my alter ego Jacob is in the prophetic tradition of Ezekiel. I hope so. On the other hand, he could be way off. I imagine that for every Ezekiel, there were a couple hundred false prophets walking around Jerusalem with, say, loincloths on their heads and eating clumps of dirt.
I blow my shofar. It still sounds like a fax machine, but a healthy one.
Month Three: November
They shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them.
—LEVITICUS 20:27
Day 62. It’s been more than a month since my mixed-fiber adventure. Time for me to tackle the second item on my list of Most Perplexing Laws: capital punishment.
The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment. Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that. It wasn’t just for murder. You could also be executed for adultery, blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, perjury, incest, bestiality, and witchcraft, among others. A rebellious son could be sentenced to death. As could a son who is a persistent drunkard and glutton.
The most commonly mentioned punishment method in the Hebrew Bible is stoning. So I figure, at the very least, I should try to stone. But how?
I can’t tell you the number of people who have suggested that I get adulterers and blasphemers stoned in the cannabis sense. Which is an interesting idea. But I haven’t smoked pot since I was at Brown University, when I wrote a paper for my anthropology class on the hidden symbolism of bong hits. (Brown was the type of college where this paper actually earned a B+.)
Instead I figured my loophole would be this: The Bible doesn’t specify the size of the stones. So…pebbles.
A few days ago, I gathered a handful of small white pebbles from Central Park, which I stuffed in my back pants pocket. Now all I needed were some victims. I decided to start with Sabbath breakers. That’s easy enough to find in this workaholic city. I noticed that a potbellied guy at the Avis down our block had worked on both Saturday and Sunday. So no matter what, he’s a Sabbath breaker.
Here’s the thing, though: Even with pebbles, it is surprisingly hard to stone people.
My plan had been to walk nonchalantly past the Sabbath violator and chuck the pebbles at the small of his back. But after a couple of failed passes, I realized it was a bad idea. A chucked pebble, no matter how small, does not go unnoticed.
My revised plan: I would pretend to be clumsy and drop the pebble on his shoe. So I did.
And in this way I stoned. But it was probably the most polite stoning in history—I said, “I’m sorry,” and then leaned down to pick up the pebble. And he leaned down at the same time, and we almost butted heads, and then he apologized, then I apologized again.
Highly unsatisfying.
Today I get another chance. I am resting in a small public park on the Upper West Side, the kind where you see retirees eating tuna sandwiches on benches.
“Hey, you’re dressed queer.”
I look over. T
he speaker is an elderly man, mid-seventies, I’d guess. He is tall and thin and is wearing one of those caps that cabbies wore in movies from the forties.
“You’re dressed queer,” he snarls. “Why you dressed so queer?”
I have on my usual tassels, and, for good measure, have worn some sandals and am carrying a knotty maple walking stick I’d bought on the internet for twenty-five dollars.
“I’m trying to live by the rules of the Bible. The Ten Commandments, stoning adulterers…”
“You’re stoning adulterers?”
“Yeah, I’m stoning adulterers.”
“I’m an adulterer.”
“You’re currently an adulterer?”
“Yeah. Tonight, tomorrow, yesterday, two weeks from now. You gonna stone me?”
“If I could, yes, that’d be great.”
“I’ll punch you in the face. I’ll send you to the cemetery.”
He is serious. This isn’t a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him.
I fish out my pebbles from my back pocket.
“I wouldn’t stone you with big stones,” I say. “Just these little guys.”
I open my palm to show him the pebbles. He lunges at me, grabbing one out of my hand, then flinging it at my face. It whizzes by my cheek.
I am stunned for a second. I hadn’t expected this grizzled old man to make the first move. But now there is nothing stopping me from retaliating. An eye for an eye.
I take one of the remaining pebbles and whip it at his chest. It bounces off. “I’ll punch you right in the kisser,” he says.
“Well, you really shouldn’t commit adultery,” I say.
We stare at each other. My pulse has doubled.
Yes, he is a septuagenarian. Yes, he had just threatened me using corny Honeymooners dialogue. But you could tell: This man has a strong dark side.
Our glaring contest lasts ten seconds, then he walks away, brushing by me as he leaves.
When I was a kid, I saw an episode of All in the Family in which Meathead—Rob Reiner’s wussy peacenik character—socked some guy in the jaw. Meathead was very upset about this. But he wasn’t upset that he committed violence; he was upset because it felt so good to commit violence.
I can relate. Even though mine was a stoning lite, barely fulfilling the letter of the law, I can’t deny: It felt good to chuck a rock at this nasty old man. It felt primal. It felt like I was getting vengeance on him. This guy wasn’t just an adulterer, he was a bully. I wanted him to feel the pain he’d inflicted on others, even if that pain was a tap on the chest.
Like Meathead, I also knew that this was a morally stunted way to feel. Stoning is about as indefensible as you can get. It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality? Later that week, I ask my spiritual adviser Yossi about stoning. Yossi was born in Minnesota and calls himself a “Jewtheran”—Jewish guilt and Lutheran repression mesh nicely, he told me. He’s an ordained Orthodox rabbi but never practiced, instead opting for the shmata trade—he sold scarves to, among others, the Amish. He’s tall and broad shouldered with a neatly trimmed beard. In his spare time, Yossi writes wry essays about Jewish life, including a lament about how his favorite snack, Twinkies, recently became nonkosher. I met him through Aish HaTorah, an Orthodox outreach group.
He isn’t fazed by my question at all.
We don’t stone people today because you need a biblical theocracy to enforce the stoning, he explains. No such society exists today. But even in ancient times, stoning wasn’t barbaric.
“First of all, you didn’t just heave stones,” says Yossi. “The idea was to minimize the suffering. What we call ‘stoning’ was actually pushing the person off the cliff so they would die immediately upon impact. The Talmud actually has specifications on how high the cliff must be. Also, the person getting executed was given strong drink to dull the pain.”
Plus, the stonings were a rare thing. Some rabbis say executions occurred only once every seven years, others say even less often. There had to be two witnesses to the crime. And the adulterer had to be tried by a council of seventy elders. And, weirdly, the verdict of those seventy elders could not be unanimous—that might be a sign of corruption or brainwashing. And so on.
I half-expected Yossi to say they gave the adulterer a massage and a gift bag. He made a compelling case. And yet, I’m not totally sold. Were biblical times really so merciful? I suspect there might be some whitewashing going on. As my year progresses, I’ll need to delve deeper.
And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you.
—DEUTERONOMY 8:10
Day 64. A spiritual update: I’m still agnostic, but I do have some progress to report on the prayer front. I no longer dread prayer. And sometimes I’m even liking it. I’ve gone so far as to take the training wheels off and am testing out some of my own prayers instead of just repeating passages from the Bible.
Elton Richards—the pastor out to pasture—broke down prayer for me into four types. It’s a handy mnemonic: ACTS. A for adoration (praising God). C for confession (telling God your sins). T for thanksgiving (being grateful to God for what you have). S for supplication (asking God to help you).
Right now, the one that’s working for me best is T, thanksgiving. Adoration feels awkward to me. Confession feels forced. As for supplication, I’m doing it, but I feel greedy asking God to help my career. Should I really be cluttering His in-box by asking for better placement of The Know-It-All at airport bookstores?
But thanksgiving, that I’m getting into. In Deuteronomy, the Bible says that we should thank the Lord when we’ve eaten our fill—grace after meals, it’s called. Christians moved grace to the beginning of the meal, preappetizer. To be safe, I’m praying both before and after.
Today, before tasting my lunch of hummus and pita bread, I stand up from my seat at the kitchen table, close my eyes, and say in a hushed tone:
“I’d like to thank God for the land that he provided so that this food might be grown.”
Technically, that’s enough. That fulfills the Bible’s commandment. But while in thanksgiving mode, I decide to spread the gratitude around:
“I’d like to thank the farmer who grew the chickpeas for this hummus. And the workers who picked the chickpeas. And the truckers who drove them to the store. And the old Italian lady who sold the hummus to me at Zingone’s deli and told me ‘Lots of love.’ Thank you.”
Now that I type it, it sounds like an overly earnest Oscar speech for best supporting Middle Eastern spread. But saying it feels good.
Here’s the thing: I’m still having trouble conceptualizing an infinite being, so I’m working on the questionable theory that a large quantity is at least closer to infinity. Hence the overabundance of thank-yous. Sometimes I’ll get on a roll, thanking people for a couple of minutes straight—the people who designed the packaging, and the guys who loaded the cartons onto the conveyor belt. Julie has usually started in on her food by this point.
The prayers are helpful. They remind me that the food didn’t spontaneously generate in my fridge. They make me feel more connected, more grateful, more grounded, more aware of my place in this complicated hummus cycle. They remind me to taste the hummus instead of shoveling it into my maw like it’s a nutrition pill. And they remind me that I’m lucky to have food at all. Basically, they help me get outside of my self-obsessed cranium.
I’m not sure this is what the Bible intended, but it feels like a step forward.
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
—PSALMS 14:1
Day 67. The ancient Israelites were surrounded by unbelievers. This is clear from the amount of space the Bible devotes to condemning idolatry, paganism, and false gods. An impressive 46 of the 613 Jewish laws deal with the topic (give or take a few, d
epending on how you classify them). It is, I think, one of the main similarities between ancient Israel and twenty-first-century New York—we live amidst a sea of unbelievers.
I feel tempted all the time—not so much by a cult to Baal, but by the lure of secular humanism. To face my demons, I decide to go deep into the heart of unbelief: the weekly New York City Atheists meeting at a midtown Greek restaurant.
I know a fair amount of atheists, seeing as I live in a relatively godless town. But there’s no way that you could drag any of my atheist acquaintances to a meeting of New York City Atheists. Some of my friends are atheists precisely because they want to avoid joining a group that meets on a weekend and talks about plans for a cable-access TV show.
An atheist club felt oxymoronic, like an apathy parade. But against all odds, it exists. The gathering of the godless takes place in a back room with a long table. A big blue atheism banner hangs from the ceiling—right next to the Christmas decorations of cardboard silver angels, an irony several of the atheists point out.
I meet my neighbors. One is a compact woman with graying hair and a Darwin cap. How was she converted to atheism? “I grew up with a Methodist aunt who was basically a Victorian,” she tells me. “I couldn’t say the word leg. I had to say limb. I once said the word constipation and got smacked. The hypocrisy was too much for me.”
Then there is the big guy who looks like he’s either a stevedore or hockey coach. “I’m a second-generation atheist,” he says. “My dad spat when he walked by churches or synagogues.”
There is a short-haired woman who seems quite eager to steer the conversation to her self-published book, which is about an atheist arena cleaner in ancient Rome. “The main character’s job was to clean up the carnage after the gladiators.”