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

by A. J. Jacobs

  Today, I’m waiting on the subway platform for the downtown B train, trying not to get annoyed that express trains keep whooshing by while the local is MIA. About twenty feet away, I spot a woman in an Adidas T-shirt and blue jeans. She is working the platform, going from commuter to commuter asking for change.

  She is making absolutely no headway. These people have perfected the art of ignoring the homeless. Their body language is very clear: “I am unable to look up for even a second because I am so deeply involved in observing this discarded Tropicana pineapple juice carton on the track.” It’s heartbreaking.

  The homeless woman does her best; she stares at them, open palmed for a good half minute, then moves on. She comes to me. I am biblically obligated to give, so I get out my wallet and hand her a dollar. She takes the money and smiles. I feel good.

  And then she throws open her arms for a hug. I wasn’t expecting that. As a germaphobe, I’ve never been a hugger. More of a polite nodder. And with my biblical living, I’ve become even more leery of hugs, seeing as the Hebrew Scriptures caution against touching women. But what am I going to do? Be a callous schmuck? I hug her.

  At which point she goes for a kiss. I swivel my head in time so that she misses my lips and gets my cheek.

  She steps back and looks at me.

  “Did you just take advantage of me?”

  I laugh nervously. “No.”

  “I think you took advantage of me. I think you made a pass at me.”

  More nervous laughter from me.

  “I’m going to report you!” she says, her voice rising. She isn’t smiling. She just glowers at me as I sputter denials and apologies for any misunderstanding. By this time, most of the commuters have stopped reading their papers to check out this grabby, hirsute, fringe-wearing pervert who has tried to fondle the panhandler.

  “I’m going to report you,” she repeats.

  The C train comes. It’s not the train I need, but close enough for me. “Sorry, I have to go.”

  As I sit down, I look out the window to see if the Adidas woman is following me. She isn’t. She is, instead, cracking up—having a good stomach-clutching laugh. She’d been playing me. She’d homed in on a lanky guy with a beard and decided to spice up her day. Can’t blame her for that. Maybe it was an even better gift than the dollar.

  A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.

  —PROVERBS 11:1

  Day 222. Julie is feeling slightly better about the impending three-sons situation. Part of her problem had been that the male-female ratio in our house will be 4:1. She’ll be outnumbered. She’ll be the One Who Doesn’t Belong.

  As self-prescribed therapy, she’s made a big list of sons who treat their mothers well. And, conversely, another big list of sons who have terrible relationships with their dads. She consults this list often. It doesn’t seem quite biblical. But I’m not about to stop her. In fact, I decide to throw in a couple of dysfunctional father-son Bible stories to help her cause.

  “Absalom led a rebellion against his father, King David,” I tell her.

  “OK,” she says.

  “And you know Reuben?”

  “The firstborn son of Jacob,” she says. (Julie’s favorite musical is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.)

  “Well, he slept with his father’s concubine. And his father was so angry, he took away Reuben’s birthright.”

  By the way, I can’t tell you the number of people who try to console us by telling us that, with our three boys, we can start our own team. They never say what kind of team. Three-man bobsled? Arena polo? The options seem somewhat limited.

  Julie’s also feeling better because she’s been able to avoid getting too huge, at least so far. Her legs, arms, and face look remarkably unbloated. Her stomach, though, is hard to ignore. It looks like she ate a wrecking ball for breakfast.

  She’s off to the ob-gyn’s office for a checkup this morning. “I hate the scale there,” she says. “It’s always two pounds heavier than the one at the gym. Plus, the nurse rushes me. I never have time to take off my sneakers before getting weighed.”

  I nod. I decide not to tell Julie, since I know I’d be met with an eye roll, but she’s hit on an important biblical theme: inaccurate scales. I’m guessing that the scales in question measured barley and spelt, not wives in their second trimester, but, regardless, the issue gets a lot of play.

  How much? The law of fair weights and measures appears an impressive six times in the Bible. By way of comparison, the passages often cited to condemn homosexuality: also six.

  The laws about weights and measures are generally given a wide interpretation; the Bible here is demanding fair business practices. Which does seem like a good idea. But if frequency of mentions counts for anything, I should probably be focusing my wrath on improperly calibrated truck weigh stations.

  Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler; and whoever is led astray by it is not wise.

  —PROVERBS 20:1

  Thou dost cause…wine to gladden the heart of man

  —PSALMS 104:14–15

  Day 223. I’m in the kitchen drinking a glass of red wine as Julie microwaves some pizza. Julie tells me that she wants me to give up alcohol for the rest of her pregnancy.

  “It’ll be a sign of solidarity,” she says. “Paul did it when Lisa was pregnant.”

  I make a note to have a discussion with our friend Paul.

  “And isn’t there something in the Bible about not drinking?” she asks.

  I tell her it’s complicated. After a couple of minutes of back-and-forth, Julie reveals her true motivation: She thinks a few weeks of abstemiousness would help shrink my gut.

  “Look at that stomach,” she says. “How many months are you? Four? Five? You having twins too?”

  OK, OK, very good. And, yet, there must be a better way to shed pounds. I’m no wine enthusiast—despite the bizarre and inexplicable fact that I edited the wine page at Esquire for a few months (it mostly involved spell-checking words like Gewürztraminer)—but I do like an occasional glass.

  Before I started living biblically, I had feared that I’d be forced into a year of sobriety. After all, I knew some Puritans banned booze. And certain fundamentalist Christians think of alcohol as up there with adultery, idol worship, and South Park. A few even argue that the “wine” drunk in the Bible is not wine at all but actually grape juice. This was the thinking of a temperance advocate named Thomas Welch, who tried to sell “unfermented wine” in the late nineteenth century for communion services. He failed. At least until his family changed the name to grape juice and marketed it to the secular.

  The truth is, biblical wine is wine. But is it a good thing or a bad thing? In some passages, wine seems like a gift from God. In other passages, it’s portrayed as a wicked toxin: “[Wine] bites like a serpent, and stings like an adder. Your eyes will see strange things, and your mind utter perverse things. You will be like one who lies down in the midst of the sea, like one who lies on the top of a mast” (Proverbs 23:32–34).

  To clear things up, I found the expert of all experts, a conservative Christian oenophile named Daniel Whitfield. Whitfield has made an astoundingly exhaustive study of every alcohol reference in Scripture—all 247 of them. I quote his findings here:

  On the negative side, there are 17 warnings against abusing alcohol, 19 examples of people abusing alcohol, 3 references to selecting leaders, and one verse advocating abstinence if drinking will cause a brother to stumble. Total negative references: 40, or 16 percent.

  On the positive side, there are 59 references to the commonly accepted practice of drinking wine (and strong drink) with meals, 27 references to the abundance of wine as an example of God’s blessing, 20 references to the loss of wine and strong drink as an example of God’s curse, 25 references to the use of wine in offerings and sacrifices, 9 references to wine being used as a gift, and 5 metaphorical references to wine as a basis for a favorable comparison. Total po
sitive references: 145, or 59 percent.

  Neutral references make up the remaining 25 percent.

  If I could add one observation to Whitfield’s study: There is also one reference to medicinal alcohol: “No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments” (1 Timothy 5:23).

  It comes down to the battle between the Bible’s gusto for life, and the Bible’s wariness of excess. Between its Epicureanism and Puritanism. You can find both themes in the Scriptures. The Epicurean side is best seen in Ecclesiastes:

  “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God” (Ecclesiastes 2:24).

  The key seems to be to enjoy wine as one of the many great things that God has provided us. But don’t enjoy it too much. Use what Anheuser-Busch public service announcements call “responsible drinking.”

  Otherwise, bad things happen. For instance, there’s the remarkable story of what happened when Lot—the one who fled Sodom—drank too much. Lot had escaped to a cave with his two daughters (his wife, as you know, had been turned into a pillar of salt). The daughters, thinking all other men in the world had died, got their father very, very drunk—and slept with him. Both got pregnant. Their incestuous offspring founded two nations, Moab and Ammon, which became enemies of Israel.

  Too much wine is an abomination. But a glass or two? That seems fine. I show Julie the results of Whitfield’s wine study. I tell her I’d be willing to water down the wine a bit, since most scholars think that biblical wine had a lower alcohol content.

  Incidentally, I just did an internet search for marijuana and the Bible. As I suspected, someone has figured out a way to make the Bible seem in favor of pot smoking. Not only does the website Equal Rights 4 All! quote Genesis 1:29 (“Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed which is upon the face of all the earth…To you it will be for meat”), but it claims that Moses’s holy anointing oil contained a high concentration of THC. This, as my high-school hero Jeff Spicoli used to say, seems totally bogus.

  “You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your dwellings you shall eat unleavened bread.”

  —EXODUS 12:20

  Day 229. It’s April 12, perhaps the most famous biblical holiday of them all: Passover. If you’re even remotely Jewish, you know it as the religiously themed, springtime version of Thanksgiving. And if you’re Christian, you probably know it, at the very least, as the meal that Jesus was eating at the Last Supper.

  Secular as my family was, even I have attended a handful of Passover dinners, mostly at my dad’s cousin’s house in Long Island. We’d tell an abbreviated story of the Jews’ flight from Egypt, eat our matzoh, and then talk about movies. They were lovely meals, but biblically literal? Not so much. To give you an idea: We recited the Nine Plagues. The tenth one—the killing of Egypt’s firstborn—was left out for being too harsh. Which seems like leaving that unpleasant throwing-herself-in-front-of-the-train business out of Anna Karenina.

  This year I wanted an uncensored Passover. I wanted to tell the whole story of the Exodus. More, though, I wanted to try to re-create that very first Passover as much as I could. Today’s seders—even the strict ones—bear little resemblance to that original meal. Which I discovered may be a good thing.

  I hold my attempted biblical seder at our apartment. My parents and parents-in-law show up around five o’clock. I greet them in my biblically mandated outfit. Exodus says to eat with your “loins girded”—I wear a belt around a white robe. “Your sandals on your feet”—Tevas. “And your staff in your hand”—the maple-wood “Walden Walking Stick” I bought on the internet.

  We sit down, and I pass around a plate of unleavened bread. I had made this myself; no store-bought matzoh for me. That very first unleavened bread, the Bible says, was cooked by the Israelites as they wandered out of Egypt. They didn’t have time to put the bread on stones, so they put it on their backs and let the sun harden it.

  I decided to do the same. That morning, I had taken some kosher flour, added water, made a hubcap-sized pancake, slipped it into a plastic Ziploc bag, and slapped the whole mixture on my back. I walked, hunched over, a few blocks to the hardware store, bought some C batteries for Julie, and came back. Maybe the dough was too well-camouflaged by my white shirt, because the guy at the hardware store didn’t bat an eye.

  The plate returns to me untouched. No one has taken a piece.

  “I had it in a plastic bag,” I say. “It’s not like I sweated on it.”

  They shake their heads. Not surprising, I guess. “More for me.” It isn’t bad; kind of chewy, what I imagine pizza dough tastes like after thirty seconds in the toaster oven.

  As I am eating the matzoh, I lose control of the table. I am supposed to be the leader, the one telling the great story of the Exodus, but already the topic of conversation has lapsed into a discussion of the prices at local parking lots. I think back to my ex-uncle Gil, and how he screamed, “Only holy topics!” I wish I had his maniacal charisma.

  Instead I go to fetch the lamb from the kitchen. The ancient Israelites ate the sacrificed lamb—all of it, from head to feet. (Today many Jews don’t eat lamb on Passover, as it can’t be sacrificed properly without the Temple.) The closest I could get to this original meal was a fifteen-pound hunk of kosher lamb I bought at an Upper West Side butcher, and which I somehow conned my mother-in-law into roasting.

  The lamb at that first Passover was key, because it provided the blood that saved a nation. God ordered the Israelites to paint the lamb’s blood on the doorposts—the secret sign so that the Angel of Death would know to skip over their houses and not slay their firstborn.

  That’s another thing: lamb’s blood; I needed to do something about that. After several phone calls, I had determined that selling lamb’s blood in the U.S. is illegal. Which was a relief. I didn’t really want a bucket of blood in the fridge—too Dahmer-esque. Instead I improvised by using the lamb juice from the saucepan, which I figure contains at least a hint of blood. And as for painting it on my doorpost? The paintbrush, says the Bible, should be made of hyssop, a minty herb. I discovered an online store called Blessed Herbs—cofounded by Martha Volchok, “herbalist and mother of four home-schooled children”—and ordered a bag that looked alarmingly like something I would buy in senior year of high school from a guy named Boo on 68th Street.

  “If anyone wants to watch me paint the doorposts, come with me now,” I announce.

  Most everyone stays at the table, but Julie comes along to supervise, and my nieces follow out of curiosity. I go into the building hallway and carefully dab lamb juice on the sides and top of our door frame, leaving brownish stains and a couple of stray hyssop leaves. Julie isn’t happy about the stains but is more worried about our neighbor Nancy’s dog.

  “He’s going to go berserk when he smells the blood.”

  Back at the table, I take out my ex-girlfriend’s Bible and read a section from Exodus. I figure this is better than trying to summarize the story myself. I read for about three minutes, starting with this passage:

  “Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.”’”

  I close my Bible and let the story sink in. “Does anyone else have anything they want to say?” I ask.

  My dad does. He has brought a packet of photocopied handwritten pages. They are a collection of childhood memories that his mother—my grandmother—had written before she died. My dad reads the section about her memories of family seders in the 1920s.

  Before the seders, my mother would buy a very large live carp and bring it home (how, I don’t know). She put it into the bathtub to swim until it was time to prepare the gefilte fish we all relished so much. We kids loved watching it swim, but it was so big it could barely (and sometimes not at all) negotiate a turn at the end of the tub. We all took our showers d
ownstairs until after the fish was removed.

  She wrote about how the kids would file up and down the stairs carrying the kosher-for-Passover dishes, “all of us like ants, trip after trip, one after the other.” And about how Uncle Oscar once ate a dozen hard-boiled eggs on a dare. About how, when the seder dragged on, the prayers went “express, no local stops.”

  Her writing is vivid, fresh. The references to the customs are no longer confusing or foreign. The whole thing felt familiar. My Biblical rituals—the door painting and sandal wearing—were interesting on an intellectual level, but, frankly, I wasn’t as moved as I hoped I might be. I didn’t feel like I had been swept back to the time of the Pharaohs.

  But this writing from my grandmother—that did sweep me back. Perhaps to make a ritual resonate, I can’t skip directly from my stain-resistant dinner table in New York to a desert three thousand years ago. I need some links in between. I need my grandmother and her memories of the leviathan-sized carp of Hinsdale Street in Brooklyn.

  Do not boast about tomorrow…

  —PROVERBS 27:1

  Day 230. Here’s a sample from a phone conversation I just had with my wife. I was at the Esquire office for a meeting.

  “What time are you coming home?” Julie asks.

  “Six o’clock, God willing.”

  “Also, John Munzer left a message on the answering machine.”

  “Thanks. I’ll call him back, God willing.”

  “See you soon.”

  “God willing.”

  It’s not an atypical snippet. For the last month, I’ve been saying “God willing” at least eighty times a day.

  Both the Old Testament and the New Testament say this is a good idea. Proverbs advises us, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.” In the New Testament, James 4:13–15 cautions against saying: “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city,” but “Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that’” (NAS).