by A. J. Jacobs
Now the day is here. I spend the morning inspecting my beard. I go into the living room to get in some last-minute prayers. Julie’s in there.
“You OK?” asks Julie.
“Not really.”
“Well, you’re making me really happy. Try to focus on that.”
The shave itself is scheduled for two o’clock on September 18. The publisher sent a photographer over to get before and after shots, so I spend a few minutes staring at the camera and trying not to look too much like a terrorist. Don’t want to scare off potential book buyers.
Luckily, the photographer doesn’t ask me to smile. This would have been hard. My mood is black for several reasons. First, there’s always an immediate postpartum depression after finishing a big project. I felt it when I read the entry on ?
Zywiec in the encyclopedia. I feel unmoored and a little scared. What do I do? I don’t have structure. Second, my beard has been with me for so long, it’s taken on its own identity, almost become a living organism. I feel like I’m losing a pet rabbit.
And third, I’m not just shaving my beard, I’m amputating a large part of my identity. In a couple of hours, I won’t be Jacob anymore. I’ll be back to being a regular old, unremarkable New Yorker, one of millions.
It’s two o’clock when I take the first snip out of my beard. It’s not easy, the logistics of shaving this thing. You can’t just put on some cream and whip out the razor. First, I hack away at the beard for forty-five minutes with a big silver pair of scissors. The clumps of hair float down, turning the sink black and making the floor look like a Supercuts franchise. The beard eventually shrinks down to the length of putting-green grass. I sweep up all the tufts and stuff them into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. Not sure what I’m going to do with this bag of hair. Maybe give away patches with the first one hundred copies of the book.
And now for the razor. Actually, I bought a new razor for the occasion. In this year, a lot has happened in the razor industry. Back when I was shaving regularly, they had a mere three blades. Now these newfangled five-bladed ones have popped up. I lather up, jut out my chin, and put the razor to my neck. I hear that familiar scrape. A stripe of skin appears. And another. After ten minutes, I wash off the rest of the shaving cream, and there it is. My face.
Man, I look weird. I feel naked, vulnerable. My cheeks are tingling, like my face just got out of a yearlong steam bath.
Julie has been watching the last five minutes. “You look like you’re fourteen!”
And it’s true. Maybe it’s an optical illusion—like how a little circle looks even smaller when it’s next to a huge circle—but I could pass for an eighth-grader.
Julie grabs my cheeks and pulls me toward her. I kiss her for the first time in two months. Which is lovely. I had forgotten how her lips felt.
The photographer was kind enough to bring champagne. He pops it over our sink and pours some glasses for me, him, and Julie. I’m about to take a sip, when I pause. I say a silent prayer of thanks for the champagne. The prayer feels good, different, unforced. I’m off the clock.
He shall restore what he took by robbery…
—LEVITICUS 6:4
Day 387. It’s been a week since the shave. The first day was the worst. I felt unanchored. Too many choices. It reminded me of the overwhelming freedom I experienced on that first day of freshman year at college, but without any of the exhilaration and double the dread.
Oh, and lots of guilt. I felt like I was getting away with all sorts of transgressions. I went to the barber and had my hair washed by a woman. All the while I was thinking, “Can I really do this? Can I really flip through the People magazine while she’s trimming my sideburns? Can I really buy a banana on the way home without worrying if it’s from a tree that’s more than four years old?” It still seemed wrong.
Every day the guilt recedes a little. Every day I get a bit more accustomed to choice. Choice isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I tell myself. And at least my year helped narrow my choices.
I’ll never be Jacob again. I’ll never live with so many restrictions. But a part of my biblical alter ego has carried over. If my Bible self had a footlong beard, what remains is barely a five o’clock shadow, but it’s there. I think it’ll always be there.
Right now I’m at the post office, Jasper in tow. I told him I was running an errand, and he insisted on coming, since he’s somehow gotten the idea that errands are as exciting as the Central Park merry-go-round. We wait fifteen minutes before getting to the front of the line. I slide a brown bubble-wrap package onto the scale. Six dollars to go to Monte Sereno, California. I pay my money. In three days my ex-girlfriend will open her mailbox to find her black leather Bible with its tissue-thin pages and faded gold embossing, the 1,536 pages that have shaped my year.
Jasper and I leave the post office, turn left, and head toward home for a quiet Friday night.
A Note from the Author
All the events in this book are true. Some of the sequences have been rearranged, and, in certain cases, the names and identifying details have been changed. Unless otherwise specified, the Bible quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.
A Note from the Author
All the events in this book are true. Some of the sequences have been rearranged, and, in certain cases, the names and identifying details have been changed. Unless otherwise specified, the Bible quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
Forgive me. I know I used the I’m-as-Jewish-as-the-Olive-Garden-is-Italian line in my last book. But it just happens to be the best description of my ethnicity.
THE PREPARATION
It’s nearly impossible to get an accurate count on the number of different Bible editions. “In English, there are more than 3,000 versions of the entire Bible or portions of the Bible,” writes Kenneth C. Davis in Don’t Know Much About the Bible. Kevin Phillips’s book American Theocracy gives a much higher number: 7,000.
Thanks to professor Julie Galambush for tipping me off to the anesthesia brouhaha.
To be precise: The Protestant Old Testament has 39 books, but the Jewish and Catholic versions have a different count. The Hebrew Bible comes in at 35 books, because several books—like Kings and Chronicles—are not split into two parts. The Catholic Old Testament totals 46 books, since it contains sections not found in the Protestant version, such as Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees.
The term midrash has a couple of meanings. It can be used to describe Jewish folklore such as the Nachshon tale. But it also has a wider meaning, namely, the collection of rabbinic sermons and commentaries on the Bible. For more, see the Encyclopedia Judaica’s midrash entry, which comes right after the entry on Bette Midler.
DAY 2
Other suspects that have been mentioned as the actual forbidden fruit: the fig, pomegranate, grapes, and wheat.
For more on Genesis’ fertility themes, see Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman.
I got concerned that my memory had distorted the meaning of cognitive dissonance. And there are a bunch of definitions nowadays. But I found the original 1959 paper establishing the theory, and it says that when there is a conflict between a person’s thoughts and actions, the “the private opinion changes so as to bring it into closer correspondence with the overt behavior.” See www.psychclassics.yorku.ca/Festinger/index.htm.
DAY 6
My wife’s ex-boyfriend’s gadget is called a Light Wedge, in case you want to buy one.
Yes, I know the whole “Eskimos have lots of words for snow” is kind of an urban legend. See Word Myths by David Wilton, p. 53, which says, “So, how many Eskimo words for snow are there? The answer is either a few or a lot, depending on how you count.” Does that clarify it?
The rabbi who talks about coveting Jaguars is Joseph Telushkin, author of Biblical Literacy, as referenced in Don’t Know Much About the Bible.
DAY 23
For an excellent article on Proverbs and spa
nking, see www.religioustolerance.org/spankin13.htm.
DAY 31
Speaking of calendars, I didn’t pay proper attention this year to the intricacies of the biblical calendar. Forgive me. I could have spent a year unraveling the debates on this topic alone. There’s the well-known Hebrew calendar, but also the Karaite calendar and the Samaritan calendar.
DAY 40
I still have no idea what that “Don’t Look Back” sign at the airport was all about. If you do, let me know.
The polls in question include Gallup and CBS News. Here’s a good article on it: www.straightdope.com/columns/061110.html.
DAY 42
The Jubilee year hasn’t been observed since the time of the Temple (The Second Jewish Book of Why, p. 262). The Sabbath year is still observed in some form, but only in Israel (ibid., p. 320).
DAY 44
I first learned about the “domino” phrase in the book Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench, a very interesting look at fundamentalism.
The history of literalism is actually far more complex and subtle than my thirty-second summary. (I know, shocking!) There’s much debate over how literally the ancients took the Bible. Some religious scholars—including Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg—argue they didn’t take it literally at all (see the discussion of mythos and logos in Day 272). These scholars say the ancients saw the Bible stories as myth—true on a deep metaphorical level, not as hard fact. It wasn’t supposed to be reportage like The Wall Street Journal. Borg quotes a Georgian aphorism: “It is true, and it is not true.”
Most scholars agree that at some point—after the Gutenberg Bible was printed? after the Renaissance?—believers started taking the Bible as factual, literal truth. And it was this literal interpretation of the Bible that spawned the dueling worldviews of modernism and fundamentalism. To complicate matters further, there are many alternatives to modernism and fundamentalism. For instance, geneticist Francis Collins wrote The Language of God, about how religion and science can be reconciled.
In Jewish biblical interpretation, the literal meaning of a passage is sometimes called “pshat” and the interpretation is called “derush.” And if you want to get really technical, there are four levels of biblical interpretation in traditional Judaism: “pshat (the literal meaning of the text), remez (its allusions), derush (the homilies that can be derived from it), and sod (its mystical secrets).” They spell out the acronym “pardes,” which means orchard (from the Lubavitcher website sichosinenglish.org).
I did, in fact, smash an idol. I took a hammer to a faux Oscar statuette that my wife bought as a party favor once. I got out some of my hostility toward celebrity culture. But frankly, it didn’t feel like it merited a chapter.
DAY 45
Sorry. I used the line about my dad working through the Apocalypse in my previous book. That’s the last time in this book that I’ll recycle a line from The Know-It-All.
DAY 46
Actually, in Judaism, life trumps all except for adultery, murder, and idolatry. Traditionally, you should choose to die before committing those. Also, I probably shouldn’t say that all rabbis would allow pig’s valves, since religion has a way of making a mockery of absolute statements. But I have yet to hear of a rabbi who would ban this.
DAY 50
If you want to be nitpicky about the whale/big fish thing: The Book of Jonah says “great fish,” though when the story is referenced in Matthew 12:40, the word whale is, in fact, used.
DAY 64
I should note that Orthodox Jews today say prayers both before and after a meal, as do some Christians.
DAY 70
The book with the broad definition of evil tongue is The 613 Mitzvot by Ronald L. Eisenberg.
DAY 82
The “vapor of vapors” translation is from Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus J. Borg. In fact, I was helped enormously by Borg’s brilliant section on the conflict between the conventional wisdom of Proverbs and the more nuanced wisdom of Ecclesiastes and Job.
DAY 87
Other Catholic objections to IVF include: (1) it usually involves masturbation; and (2) it sometimes involves discarding fertilized eggs. For more on that see Day 314.
DAY 93
The Apocrypha contains such texts as Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, and Ben Sira. In Judaism and Protestant Christianity they aren’t considered part of the canon. But in Catholicism they are and go by the name Deuterocanonical works.
DAY 110
The two most zealous propolygamy Jewish web pages: www.polygamy.com/articles/templates/?a=28&z=;and www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_4.html.
DAY 117
Later parts of the Bible seem to reject the notion of intergenerational punishment. Most notably, Ezekiel 18:20: “The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son.”
DAY 120
Incidentally, Tamar’s second husband, Onan, is most famous for being the originator of the Sin of Onan. I had always thought the Sin of Onan was masturbation. But technically, that’s not the case. Onan incurred God’s wrath when he stopped midway through intercourse with Tamar and spilled his seed on the ground. Onan didn’t want Tamar to get pregnant because, according to custom, the child would be considered his late brother’s, not his own. Onan showed disrespect for his dead brother and for God by wasting his seed. So that is the literal Sin of Onan.
DAY 128
For more on whether the commandments actually total ten, I recommend the fascinating book How to Read the Bible by Marc Brettler.
DAY 131
The scavenger hunt company is called Watson Adventures. The hunts are great. And I’m not just saying that because I sleep next to the company’s vice president.
DAY 140
The expert of all experts on kosher crickets is Natan “the Zoo Rabbi” Slifkin, whose website is zootorah.com. According to him, not all crickets are kosher, just one variety favored by Yemenite Jews.
DAY 153
The Bible says to attach tassels (or fringes) to the four corners of your garment. Where are my garment’s corners? During my DIY phase, I usually went with the two corners at the end of my Oxford shirtsleeves and the two corners at the bottom of my shirt front. If I was feeling bold, I’d go with the corners on the shirt collar.
DAY 157
The upright posture quote comes from The Jewish Book of Why by Alfred J. Kolatch.
DAY 168
For more on red heifers and the apocalypse, I recommend a great New Yorker article, “Letter from Jerusalem: Forcing the End,” by Lawrence Wright, July 20, 1998.
I’ve just skimmed the surface of the debates over Revelation. For an excellent summary of two ways of reading Revelation, I once again recommend Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. He argues strongly that Revelation was not a prediction of events yet to come (the futurist view), but was written as a short-term prophecy about the Roman Empire (the past-historical view). There are also many people who believe in some combination of the two.
DAY 181
To be precise, the documentary hypothesis refers only to the first five books of the Bible, the Books of Moses. But the same idea—multiple authors, multiple editors—applies to other parts of the Bible as well.
For a remarkably in-depth analysis of the Dr. Laura email—including more on the overliteralization of the word pigskin—you can read “President Bartlet’s Fallacious Diatribe” by Hank Hanegraaff in the Christian Research Journal, volume 23, number 3 (2001).
DAY 202
There are several other differences between the Samaritan Bible and the Hebrew Bible. They’re pretty technical, but if you’re interested, here are two websites: www.lulu.com/content/186110; and web.meson.org/religion/torahcom pare.php.
DAY 205
Speaking of the Naked Cowboy, I did a photo shoot for this book in Times Square. The publisher rented a sheep and had me in a white robe and carrying a staff. For forty-five
absurd minutes I drew more onlookers than the Naked Cowboy himself. I think that will forever be the zenith of my fame.
I think Gil misspoke when he said “Jacob was buried with Rachel,” because Jacob was actually buried with Leah. I’m guessing he meant “Abraham was buried with Sarah.”
DAY 223
Actually, the notion of booze-hating Puritans is a bit of an exaggeration. Some did, but others believed it was OK in moderation. In the words of Increase Mather, “Drink is in itself a good creature of God, and to be received with thankfulness.”
DAY 229
Regarding the lamb juice: A kosher lamb is drained of its blood, in accordance with the Bible’s taboo against eating blood. But I can’t imagine there isn’t some residual blood left in there, even if it’s just a hint.
DAY 233
For more on the oft-forgotten male impurity laws try reading the article on Taharat Hamishpachah at www.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Projects/Reln91/Blood/Judaism/new%20family/purity.htm. Also, in case you really, really want to know: I tried to comply with Leviticus 15:16, which says “And if a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening.” It wasn’t so bad. I have no objections to extra bathing, and Julie didn’t take this one personally.
DAY 234
A confession: I cut way back on movies this year, but never successfully eliminated them from my life. I saw this one, plus a whole bunch of Bible-themed films. Also, for a good, basic section on the fifth commandment (Honor your father and mother) see Don’t Know Much About the Bible, p. 120.
DAY 237
Thanks to the rock-and-roll rabbi Robbie Harris for the insight that the Bible is a “minority report.”
DAY 243
As is de rigueur with all things relating to The Da Vinci Code, the notion that a married Jesus is a more human Jesus is a controversial one. One of my spiritual advisers (who asked to remain unnamed) emailed me: “There is no scandal in supposing that Jesus married and had children. It is a stupid reading of the scriptural text, and it is very doubtful historically, but not troubling theologically. And that Dan Brown supposes that it is reveals that he does not have a clue about Christianity and that he has a very low opinion both of humanity and of the holy estate of marriage. Jesus is a man—that’s the point of the holy incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity.”