by A. J. Jacobs
Ecclesiastes says that life is uncertain. “Vapor of vapors…all is vapors.” (This is a more accurate translation of the phrase usually rendered: “vanity of vanities…all is vanity.”) We can never hope to plumb the mystery of God’s mind. Bad things happen to good people. Idiots and geniuses, saints and sinners—we all die. The best we can do is try to appreciate the great things that God has given us—food, drink, the pleasure of honest work. We should follow the commandments, but we should do so with no guarantee that they will pay off in this life.
This is so wise. Be good for goodness’ sake, as someone once said. It’s a pragmatic worldview. The thing is, it’s not a solid worldview. It’s vapor, all vapor. If I knew for sure that I’d be punished for sinning, then I’d have an undeniable reason to follow God’s word. But I doubt I’ll ever believe that for certain. So what to do? Part of me wants something more tangible than the vapor. Can I find it by the end of the year? Or is that, as Ecclesiastes says, chasing the wind?
He who despises his neighbor is a sinner…
—PROVERBS 14:21
Day 84. I’ve been trying to love my neighbor, but in New York, this is particularly difficult. It’s an aloof city. I don’t even know my neighbor’s names, much less love them. I know them only as woman-whose-cooking-smells-nasty and guy-who-gets-Barron’s-delivered-each-week, and so forth.
Well, except for Nancy in 5I. We met because our son and her beagle are about the same age, have pretty much the same vocabulary, and share similar interests, such as running around the hall.
Nancy is a former hippie who was once friends with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. In fact, she looks like what Janis Joplin would have looked like if Janis Joplin had lived another thirty-five years. In the sixties, Nancy took a lot of drugs, had a couple of disastrous relationships with men, did some waitressing, wrote some poetry, and now lives alone with her dog and listens to Howard Stern every morning. She almost always wears sundresses and knit caps. She calls herself “the kooky lady with the dog.”
She’s painfully shy, almost skittish. She’ll visit our apartment occasionally, but when I knock on hers, she always just cracks the door open and pokes her head out. “I’m painting one wall at a time,” she once explained. “I don’t want anyone to see it till it’s done.” She also once told me that I unnerved her because I maintained too much eye contact. (Which is, in fact, a problem for me. I often forget to glance away intermittently during conversations, and have to remind myself to do so; otherwise people will think I’m a psycho who keeps a cup of noses in my freezer.)
Nancy was married for a while after college, but she couldn’t have kids. So she’s become the unofficial godmother to our son. For the past few months she’s been sketching a portrait of him. “I’ll be finished soon,” she promises. “By the time he takes his SATs.”
And today she brings Jasper an early holiday present: a wooden Noah’s ark with a menagerie of little painted animals. She thought it’d be good to get him a biblical present. I make Jasper say thank you, a phrase he pronounces without those tiresome consonants, so it sounds like a-ew.
“You know, it’s interesting,” I say to Nancy as we sit at the kitchen table watching Jasper march the giraffes onto his boat. “I was reading in one of my Bible commentaries about how the flood is such a tragic story—the drowning of millions of people and animals—and how strange it is that it’s always made into cute kids’ toys.”
Nancy looks wounded.
“I didn’t…” Ugh. What a putz. I had tried to show off my biblical knowledge, and I ended up insulting my only friendly neighbor. The Bible tells us not to be know-it-alls—“A prudent man conceals his knowledge…” (Proverbs 12:23).
“I love his ark,” I say. “It’s adorable…”
“Don’t worry,” she says, recovering. “At least I didn’t get him the stuffed ten plagues.”
Nancy is a good neighbor, probably the best I’ve had in my time as a New Yorker. I decide that this will be one of my missions for the year: Do something righteous—a good deed, a mitzvah—for my neighbor in 5I.
“Therefore he may lie with you tonight in return for your son’s mandrakes.”
—GENESIS 30:15 (NAB)
Day 87. As of this week, Julie and I have officially been trying to be fruitful and multiply for a year. Still no luck. So we’ve decided to take radical measures. We’re going to try in vitro fertilization.
This is more morally fraught than I had realized. Thanks to my religion-soaked life, I now know that several higher authorities condemn the procedure. The Catholic Church, for instance, denounces IVF for several reasons. Among them: it breaks what one Catholic magazine calls “the unity and integrity” of “conjugal fruitfulness.” Which means that the conception takes place outside the woman’s body, not where God intended it.
On the other hand, most rabbis don’t have much of a problem with IVF—and some Jewish scholars even argue that “be fruitful and multiply” means that there’s a moral imperative to get pregnant by any means necessary. Which is why New York fertility clinics are often crowded with black hats and voluminous beards.
The Bible, of course, never addresses the issue directly. There’s nary a mention of IVF in Scripture, even by its long-forgotten name of “test-tube baby.” There is, however, a biblical story about fertility drugs—or their ancient equivalent, anyway. You remember Jacob, who was married to two sisters: Leah (the baby machine) and Rachel (the one with the barren womb). At one point, Rachel got so desperate, she pleaded with her sister for some mandrake. Mandrake is the forked Mediterranean root that was thought to be an infertility cure. Rachel got her mandrake, but the scheme backfired. Because Rachel, to secure the mandrake, had traded to Leah a night with Jacob—and on that very night, Jacob was apparently at maximum virility. Leah got pregnant. Rachel got nothing, at least for the time being. So…you could argue that the Bible subtly disapproves of fertility treatments.
But, honestly, that seems like speculation. If I take the Bible literally—at its word—I can’t find any guidance pro or con.
So we’re going to try IVF. It helps that my new insurance plan covers it. And it helps, too, that we have a family connection to the procedure. My cousin David—now twenty-three—was the very first test-tube baby in New York State, and he got his little technologically assisted face on the cover of the Daily News. He seems to have turned out all right. He fits in fine with my family—with the exception of my ultraliberal aunt Marti, who squabbles with him every time they’re in the same room. David, former president of his fraternity, likes manly things such as baseball and a big, juicy piece of meat. Marti does not. Whenever someone takes a family photo, she tells us all to say “Soy cheese!” which always prompts David to shout a gleefully malicious “T-bone!” (To be technical, Marti has since decided that soy causes health problems, so she now prefers us to say “Vegan.”)
IVF is a startlingly complicated process. The buildup to the actual fertilization involves forty days of shots, pills, alcohol swabs, and a fearsome array of syringes. Granted, I get the better half of the deal. Julie actually has to be poked by a needle every day. But I do have to be her RN, mixing together white powders and sterile water in what seems the most stressful chemistry experiment of my life.
The first night, a Russian-accented nurse came to our apartment to show me how to inject my wife. She asked Julie to drop her pants and lean over. “It’s just like throwing a dart,” the nurse told me. Though with this dart, you miss, and the target starts bleeding.
“Each night, you alternate cheeks—first right, then left, right, left.” And, she advised, you have to make sure the needle hits the sweet spot of the upper butt.
I don’t like vagueness. So I opened a drawer, took out a green magic marker, and requested the nurse to draw me the exact location of these “sweet spots” on Julie’s butt. Which she did. And which helps me enormously. But not Julie. She complains that whenever she wears white pants, everyone can see two green orbs on her butt.
“I hope this works,” Julie told me yesterday. “Because I don’t think I can go through this again.”
…For God is with the generation of the righteous.
—PSALMS 14:5
Day 91, the end of month three of Project Bible. Thanks to the beard, my alter ego Jacob is looking more and more religious. Or, to be precise, more and more Jewish. I know this because I was stopped by some tourists on the street the other day and asked “Where in New York can we get a good knish?” More to the point, I was told by a guy at the soup kitchen where I volunteer, “You look really Jewish.” Hard to misinterpret that one.
On the other hand, my ethical state leaves much to be desired. This occurs to me as I am sitting on the crosstown bus today reading Ecclesiastes.
I’m concentrating hard. Too hard. I feel a tap on my shoulder. I’m annoyed. I don’t like strangers touching me. I look up. It is a fiftyish man.
“Excuse me, this lady is feeling sick. Could you give her your seat?”
He points to a tall brunette woman who was standing right in front of me. How did I miss this? The woman looks horrible: Her face is sallow, nearly the color of lima beans. She is doubled over. And she is weeping.
I get up in a hurry with mumbled apologies. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there’s a time for reading and a time for getting off your butt.
I realize that I was what is known in Hebrew as a Chasid Shote. A righteous idiot. In the Talmud, there’s a story about a devout man who won’t save a drowning woman because he’s afraid of breaking the no-touching-women ban. He’s the ultimate pious fool.
The moral is the same as Jesus’s parable about the Good Samaritan: Don’t be so caught up in the regulations that you forget about the big things, like compassion and respect for life. The righteous idiot is what the Christian Bible calls a Pharisee—one of the sanctimonious legalistic scholars who criticize Christ’s followers for picking grain on the Sabbath.
As I mentioned in the introduction, one of the reasons that I embarked on this experiment was to take legalism to its logical extreme and show that it leads to righteous idiocy. What better way to demonstrate the absurdity of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism? If you actually follow all the rules, you’ll spend your days acting like a crazy person.
I still believe that. And I still plan on making a complete fool of myself to get this point across. But as with everything involving religion, my project has become much more complicated. The spiritual journey now takes up far more of my time.
My friend Roger was right. It’s not like studying Sumo wrestling in Japan. It’s more like wrestling itself. This opponent of mine is sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel, sometimes ancient, sometimes crazily relevant. I can’t get a handle on it.
Month Four: December
For everything there is a season…
—ECCLESIASTES 3:1
Day 93. December has arrived, and everyone is gearing up for the big Judeo-Christian holidays. New York is packed. I tried to walk through Rockefeller Center the other day, and I got flashbacks to the mosh pit at the Hasidic rave.
I feel oddly out of sync. This is because the Bible itself has surprisingly little to say about the December holidays. The New Testament talks about the birth of Jesus, of course. But there’s no description of how to celebrate that birth—no tree, no services, no carols, no eggnog, no Frank Capra films. Which means that some of the more literalist Christian denominations—including the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Worldwide Church of God—don’t celebrate Christmas at all.
Hanukkah doesn’t make it into the Bible either. The story of Hanukkah—the revolt of the Jewish rebels the Maccabees against their Greek oppressor Antiochus—appears (though only in a section of the Bible called the Apocrypha, which in Judaism is considered noncanonical). But there’s nothing in the Scriptures about the lighting of eight candles or eating oil-soaked latkes.
I’ll be sitting out this holiday season. Well, as much as I can. I still have to buy some gifts for Julie. I can’t get away with skipping that, and the Bible is actually pro-gift-giving (“It is more blessed to give than to receive,” Acts 20:35). Fortunately, buying gifts won’t take too much time; Julie is so absurdly organized, she always hands me a stack of catalogs with the gifts she wants circled in red Magic Marker and marked with Post-it notes. It’s a great thing. As is the conviction with which she says the inevitable “Oh my God! How did you know?”
Let your garments be always white.
—ECCLESIASTES 9:8
Day 95. I looked in the mirror today and decided it’s official: I’ve become someone I’d cross the street to avoid. To complement my beard and tassels, I’ve begun wearing all white, as prescribed by King Solomon in Ecclesiastes: “Let your garments be always white.” White pants, white T-shirts, a white sweater, and a white zip-up jacket from the Gap, all without mixed fibers, naturally.
Which means that when I say good-bye to Julie in the morning, I get one of two responses. Either
1) A Saturday Night Fever hand twirl and accompanying arm thrust or
2) A Fonzie-like “Aaaaayyyyyy!”
The John Travolta reference I understand, but the Fonzie one stumped me.
“In the first season, Fonzie wore white because black leather was considered too menacing,” Julie explained. (This is a woman who still has her childhood collection of TV Guides.)
Personally, I prefer to think of myself in a more highbrow mold—a biblical version of Tom Wolfe. Or perhaps a modern Emily Dickinson, who became a recluse in the 1870s and refused to wear anything but white.
Regardless, it’s a bizarre sensation walking around the Upper West Side in white garments—or “tusk” garments, as the Gap calls them. As with many New Yorkers, my regular wardrobe is made up mostly of bleak colors: blacks, browns, a daring splash of navy blue. It seems to suit the city’s soot and cynicism. Dark clothes for a dark city.
I rarely see New Yorkers wearing all white unless they’re behind a bakery counter. So I’m getting even more wary glances than ever on the subway. I like to play a game: I swivel my head around quickly and see how many gawkers I can catch. Usually at least two.
But the thing is, I’m enjoying it. My white wardrobe makes me feel lighter, more spiritual. Happier. It’s further proof of a major theme of this year: The outer affects the inner. Behavior shapes your psyche as much as the other way around. Clothes make the man. As I walk down Columbus Avenue on this brisk day, with the wind flattening my white pants and jacket against me, I think to myself, “Life can’t be too terrible if I’m dressed like I’m about to play the semifinals at Wimbledon or attend P. Diddy’s birthday party, right?”
The “white garment” line from Ecclesiastes is usually interpreted metaphorically—as a call to remain pure and joyous. But it’s not beyond-a-doubt metaphorical. Maybe it means what it says: Dress in white. An ancient Israelite sect called the Essenes dressed in white, as do some kabbalists. I should have been wearing all white from day one, but it was one of those rules I felt I had to build up to. Now that I’m doing it, I don’t want to stop.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
—EXODUS 20:8
Day 97. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in December, but I feel like I’ve just experienced my first real Sabbath.
Let me explain: The doorknobs in our apartment fall off on an alarmingly regular basis. They’re mercurial little suckers. We don’t even need to be touching them—it’s more of a natural-life-cycle type of situation, like icebergs calving or my hairline retreating. I’ll be in bed, reading my Bible, and I’ll hear a thud and know that another doorknob succumbed to gravity.
Usually, I screw the knob back on. Problem solved—for a week or two, anyway. No big deal. But this morning, it became a big deal. At 9:30 I stop typing my emails and shuffle over to the bathroom—and close the door behind me. I don’t realize what I’ve done until I reach for the nonexistent inside doorknob. It had molted sometime during the night.
For the first
ten minutes, I try to escape. I bang on the door, shout for help. No answer. Julie is away at a meeting, and Jasper is out with his babysitter. I’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven, so I know to look for the grill in the ceiling that I can unscrew, climb into, slither through an air chute, drop into my neighbor’s bedroom, make a clever comment like “just thought I’d drop in,” and then return home. No grill. I’m trapped.
The next half hour I spend going through a checklist of worst-case scenarios. What if I slip, cut my forehead on the bathtub, bleed to death, and end up on the front page of the New York Post? What if there’s a fire, and I’m forced to hang by my fingernails from the window ledge?
Even more stressful to me is that the outside world is speeding along without me. Emails are being answered. Venti lattes are being sipped. George Bush’s childhood friends are being appointed to high-level positions.
At 10:30 the phone rings. I hear a muffled voice leaving a message. This almost qualifies as human interaction. At 10:35 I make a pledge to myself to put more reading material in the bathroom if I ever escape. A Bible would have been nice. I’m stuck with an old Levenger catalog and a candle with an Omar Khayyam poem on the side: “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.” Khayyam seems to be taunting me. I don’t have a jug of wine, or a loaf of bread, or thou. I have a tube of Neutrogena shaving cream and some towels. That’s not paradise enow.
By 11:00 I’ve become the world’s greatest expert on this bathroom. I know the fake marble tiles with their spider-vein pattern and the power outlet that is tilted at a rakishly diagonal angle. I spend a half hour tidying the medicine cabinet. I notice that the ingredients in Chlor-Trimeton go all the way from A (acacia) to Z (zein), which, as a former encyclopedia reader, appeals to me.
By noon I’m sitting on the floor, my back against the shower door. I sit. And sit some more. And something odd happens. I know that, outside the bathroom, the world is speeding along. That blogs are being read. Wild salmon is being grilled. Reggaeton is being explained to middle-aged white marketing executives.