by A. J. Jacobs
When Julie and I would go out for a walk, we’d dart from our apartment to the elevator, our mouths and noses covered with our shirt collars. Julie called the maintenance staff again. They promised to look into it.
On Tuesday morning, I woke up to banging in the hallway. I opened our door a crack and peeked out. The building handyman, Victor, was outside apartment 5I—the one owned by our sweet hippie neighbor Nancy—trying to pry open her front door with a hammer. I could hear Nancy’s dog barking. Four medics lingered nearby, occasionally clicking their walkie-talkies and speaking in low voices.
I knew before one of the medics asked me that question: “Have you seen your neighbor in the last few days?”
It took Victor a half hour of pounding before he broke down the door. He went in, reemerging a few minutes later.
“Alive?” I asked.
He shook his head.
They wheeled Nancy’s body out on a stretcher covered with a sheet. They snapped a padlock on the door, along with yellow police tape ribbon and a Day-Glo sticker warning people not to even consider trying to come inside. They brought an industrial strength fan at the end of the hall to clear the smell.
I told Julie when she woke up. She sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands and didn’t talk for what seemed like two full minutes. Finally she looked up, her eyes red.
“I saw her a week ago and she was all worried about me and how I was holding up.”
I just shook my head.
“What’d she die of?”
“They don’t know yet.”
“I told them there was a smell,” said Julie. “I told them. This is what I was afraid of.”
Whenever something happens, I always try to think of a biblical precedent, a story that will help me put it into perspective. But with Nancy’s death, there is none, really. The Bible doesn’t talk much about living and dying in solitude. Adam starts out alone, but God doesn’t let that last long: “It is not good for a man to be alone.” In biblical times, the smallest unit of society wasn’t the individual. It was the family. Nancy had no family, no husband, no children, just a handful of friends, few of whom she saw very often.
That night, Julie and I lie in bed, too spent to do much reading.
“Maybe we could…say a prayer.”
Julie looks at me like I had just proposed a threeway with the waitress at Columbus Bakery.
“You serious?”
“A prayer of thanksgiving. I find them helpful. We don’t have to call it a prayer. We just give thanks.”
Julie paused. “OK.”
“Maybe we’ll start out simply.”
“I’m thankful for our health and our kids,” Julie says.
“I’m thankful we got to know Nancy,” I say.
“I’m thankful you’re ending your project soon.”
The memorial service is held a couple of days later. It’s in the apartment of a woman who knew Nancy just a little bit—they were both members of the building’s informal dog owners’ clique. Since Nancy had no family, Julie did most of the organizing, tracking down her few friends, posting a notice in the lobby.
About ten people show up. Her high-school friend Dan reads letters she’d written over the years, painfully honest notes about her loneliness and how she still has “the bends” after emerging from the sixties. We pass around the album cover she designed for Jimi Hendrix. Several people say something along the lines of: “She had a troubled life, but at least she found some peace at the end with her dog Memphis.”
And we talk about the crushing irony, a twist that sounded like it was out of a Chekhov play but was true: She died of heart failure and asthma. The asthma was brought on by her dog.
If you try to literally follow Leviticus 19:18—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—well, you can’t. That would mean putting your neighbor’s dreams, career, children, pets, and finances on par with your own. This is why it’s usually reinterpreted in the less extreme—but infinitely wise—version known as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
While she was alive, I didn’t do so well with the Golden Rule and Nancy. Here she was, my literal neighbor. Two doors down. And I had made a half-assed effort. I never invited her to dinner. I never rolled up my sleeves and helped her get her Jimi Hendrix book published. I never bought her a gift to repay her for the ones she bought Jasper. I never fulfilled my mission to do a mitzvah for her.
I got my chance to partially redeem myself. Nancy’s beagle Memphis still wasn’t adopted. He had a temporary home at another neighbor’s apartment, but that family couldn’t keep him long. So the next day I began a frantic quest: Find Memphis a home, and in so doing, make myself feel less powerless.
I clicked on to craigslist to put up a dog-adoption notice. But while there, I read a notice from the ASPCA. It warned of psychos who adopt dogs and then, for amusement, shoot them or toss them in the river. This didn’t help my mood. Instead, I sent an email blast to everyone I could think of. I included a photo of Memphis. I had snapped the photo earlier in the day—the dog was born with a droopy face, but now it was positively dragging on the ground. Will anyone adopt such a forlorn-looking mutt?
A friend of a friend responded. He wanted to meet the forlorn dog. He came over, dressed in a suit and tie, his wife and children in tow.
“Let’s think about it,” said his wife, as the kids scratched Memphis’s head.
She may have had a prudent idea. But the kids weren’t about to wait, so just like that, Memphis was off to a suburban house with a yard and a porch.
The next day I felt like I’d at least done something Nancy would have liked. But I also flashed back to a question Nancy asked me months ago:
Did I help because the Bible told me to, or because I really wanted to?
Did I find the dog a new home as a pat and tidy way to quantify some moral progress for my book? Quite possibly.
I consulted one of my spiritual advisers about this—Greg Fryer, a Lutheran minister who lives in my parents’ building. He told me the following:
“C. S. Lewis said the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive.” In short, pretending to be better than you are is better than nothing. Not only was this a great quote, but it also included dog imagery, so I thought it must be fated. I thanked Rev. Fryer and C. S. Lewis for letting my conscience off the hook.
A few days later three men in white Hazmat suits came to clear out Nancy’s apartment. They had stuffed everything—her clothes, her frying pans, her papers—into black plastic garbage bags, about a dozen of which lined the hall. And they were just getting started.
I tied a red bandana to my face, put on some yellow dishwashing gloves, and stepped past them into the apartment.
“Just looking for something real quick,” I said before they could ask for identification or permits.
I wove my way through the mess on the floor, and there, on a table in the corner, I found a stack of papers. I flipped through it. It was a very rough draft of her memoir. I took it.
“Thanks!” I said as I walked out.
When I got back to my apartment, I sat on my couch and read the handwritten pages. It’s a tough but lovely book. It’s also highly unfinished, sometimes with but a sentence fragment scribbled on top of a page. I don’t know if it’ll ever get published. I hope so. But in case it doesn’t, here’s a sentence on page forty-one that stopped me short. It is about her sketch of Jimi Hendrix, the one that became the cover to one of his albums.
“Eventually, I sold the original to the Hard Rock Cafe, not only because I needed a little money, but because I was afraid that, if I would die, it would be put on the street, like all stuff is put on the street when people die, in a black plastic bag. Now it was safe.”
…It was in my mouth as sweet as honey.
—EZEKIEL 3:3
Day 374. My niece Natalia is having her bat mitzv
ah in New Jersey today. As you probably know, the most important part of a modern bar or bat mitzvah isn’t the Torah portion or lighting the candles, it’s the theme. You’ve got to have a theme: sports, Camelot, whatever. I recently went to a bar mitzvah called Zach Wars: Revenge of the Torah, which seemed at odds with Leviticus’s ban on vengeance. Natalia’s theme is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
She and her mom have gone all out. The invitations were wrapped around a chocolate bar. Her mom spent weeks making twenty-two papier-mâché Oompa Loompas. Bowls of Skittles and M&M’s cover the tables.
Jasper is getting fidgety, so I carry him onto the dance floor, where we joined all the thirteen-year-old classmates and sixty-eight-year-old cousins twice removed. We are dancing to some Beyoncé song, and I feel something happen. I feel something envelop me and then envelop Jasper. And then I feel it keep going. I feel it spread out like a drop of cranberry juice in a glass of water, sweeping through the room, swallowing my nieces and nephew and Julie and my parents. Here I am, at this gloriously silly ritual, surrounded by giant Twizzlers and Milk Duds, my defenses down, and this feeling has seeped out of my brain through my skull and filled the room. And kept going. For all I know, it has swept out the doors and windows and into the parking lot and through the driveway.
I’d had some close calls this year. There was that hypnotic trance while watching the serpent-handling preacher. But I’ve never fully let myself go, always hovering a few feet above ground like a hot-air balloon still stuck to its tether.
So at this suburban Jersey country club, my son’s hands locked around my neck, his head pressed against my shoulder, I chose to accept this feeling and ride it to the end. To surrender. If I had to label it, I’d say the feeling is part love, part gratefulness, part connectedness, part joy. And that joy was like joy concentrate, far more intense and warmer than what I felt that night of dancing with the Hasidim. Maybe now I’ve finally felt what King David felt when he danced before the Lord. During those moments, nothing could have bothered me. If my garments flew up around my waist like King David’s did, it wouldn’t have mattered. At least to me. The joy would steamroll right on through.
My altered state only lasted all of ten seconds. Maybe less. And then it faded away. But not totally. There’s still some background radiation—which I hope to God stays for weeks, months.
Driving back to New York, I ask myself, why did that just happen? Did it have something to do with my frazzled state after Nancy’s death? Maybe. Was it because my project is about to end, and I forced myself into the state? Yeah, probably. But even if it was manufactured, it was still real. Farm-bred salmon is better than no salmon at all. Or to put it another way: My year was a controlled experiment, but sometimes experiments produce results precisely because they create extreme circumstances. If Gregor Mendel (a monk, incidentally) had let his pea pods grow willy-nilly, he never would have understood genetics.
Without my year, I wouldn’t have been open to that feeling I got on the dance floor. And for that alone, all the craziness and Handy Seats and locusts and snakes might have been worth it.
The end of all things is at hand…
—1 PETER 4:7
Day 378. One day to go. I’ve decided not to go on a Bible binge this last day. I don’t want to waste it running around like a kaparot chicken. I try to make it a slow day, a day of meditation. I want to try to get a little perspective. Such as:
Did the Bible make me a better person? It’s hard to say for sure, but I hope it did. A little, at least. The other day I handed out flyers at a Save Darfur rally, but then got angry at the people who walked by without acknowledging me. I came up with elaborate revenge fantasies in which they read about the rally in the New York Times and felt guilty for not taking my flyer, even tracking me down to apologize. In other words, I’m pretending to be a better person, which is a good first step, if C. S. Lewis is to be believed.
I’m more tolerant, especially of religion, if that helps my case. Here’s how I know this: When Jasper was born, my Orthodox aunt Kate gave him a bunch of building blocks with Hebrew letters and paintings of biblical scenes. I didn’t want Jasper using them because I was worried the blocks would somehow imprint on his brain and eventually convert him to Hasidism. Nowadays I’m not just OK with him playing with his Bible blocks, I like it. I want him to know his religion.
And the Bible itself? What do I think of it after my yearlong immersion?
When I started my project, Elton Richards made that majestic food analogy: He said my quest was like a banquet table, and not everyone would sit with me at my banquet table, but I have a hunger and thirst, so I deserve to nourish it. I loved the way he talked. I decided that by year’s end, I would employ an extended food metaphor of my own. I think I have one now. It may not be majestic, but here goes:
There’s a phrase called “Cafeteria Christianity.” It’s a derisive term used by fundamentalist Christians to describe moderate Christians. The idea is that the moderates pick and choose the parts of the Bible they want to follow. They take a nice helping of mercy and compassion. But the ban on homosexuality? They leave that on the countertop.
Fundamentalist Jews don’t use the phrase “Cafeteria Judaism,” but they have the same critique. You must follow all of the Torah, not just the parts that are palatable.
Their point is, the religious moderates are inconsistent. They’re just making the Bible conform to their own values.
The year showed me beyond a doubt that everyone practices cafeteria religion. It’s not just moderates. Fundamentalists do it too. They can’t heap everything on their plate. Otherwise they’d kick women out of church for saying hello (“the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak…”—1 Corinthians 14:34) and boot out men for talking about the “Tennessee Titans” (“make no mention of the names of other gods…”—Exodus 23:13).
But the more important lesson was this: there’s nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren’t bad per se. I’ve had some great meals at cafeterias. I’ve also had some turkey tetrazzini that gave me the dry heaves for sixteen hours. The key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones. Religious leaders don’t know everything about every food, but maybe the good ones can guide you to what is fresh. They can be like a helpful lunch lady who—OK, I’ve taken the metaphor too far.
Now, this does bring up the problem of authority. Once you acknowledge that we pick and choose from the Bible, doesn’t that destroy its credibility? Doesn’t that knock the legs out from under it? Why should we put stock in any of the Bible?
“That’s the big question,” says one of my rabbis, Robbie Harris. I put the question to Robbie as well as every other member of my advisory board. There’s no simple or totally satisfying answer. But let me offer two interesting ideas from them:
The first is from the pastor out to pasture, Elton Richards. Here’s his metaphor: Try thinking of the Bible as a snapshot of something divine. It may not be a perfect picture. It may have flaws: a thumb on the lens, faded colors in the corners. But it still helps to visualize.
“I need something specific,” says Elton. “Beauty is a general thing. It’s abstract. I need to see a rose. When I see that Jesus embraced lepers, that’s a reason for me to embrace those with AIDS. If he embraced Samaritans, that’s a reason for me to fight racism.”
The second is from Robbie himself. He says we can’t insist that the Bible marks the end of our relationship with God. Who are we to say that the Bible contained all the wisdom? “If you insist that God revealed himself only at one time, at one particular place, using these discrete words, and never any time other than that—that in itself is a kind of idolatry.” His point is: You can commit idolatry on the Bible itself. You can start to worship the words instead of the spirit. You need to “meet God halfway in the woods.”
Which brings up another question: Do I believe in a traditiona
l biblical God? Well, not in the sense that the ancient Israelites believed in Him. I could never make the full leap to accepting a God who rolls up His sleeves and fiddles with our lives like a novelist does his characters. I’m still agnostic. But in the words Elton Richards, I’m now a reverent agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It’s possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn’t take away from its power or importance.
I come away from this year with my own cafeteria religion. I’ll be doing things differently than I did thirteen months ago, things both big (resting on the Sabbath) and small (wearing more white clothes). And I’ll keep on saying prayers of thanksgiving. I’m not sure whom I’m thanking, but I’ve become addicted to the act of thanking (see the overlong acknowledgments section).
There is…a time for every matter under heaven.
—ECCLESIASTES 3:1
Day 381. My favorite book, Ecclesiastes, has these famous lines:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.
This is the time for me to uproot my topiary.
I’ve been anxious about this for weeks. First of all, I’d heard nightmare stories about kids who didn’t recognize their fathers postshave. Some of these kids went on extended crying jags. They’d scream about this strange man in their house. The relationship took weeks to recover.
I’m so paranoid about this, I came up with an idea of how to prep Jasper for the day of defoliation. It involved breaking the Second Commandment—you shall not make any images—but I did it anyway. A couple of weeks ago, I went to Staples and printed out a large color photo of my face circa 2005, from the era of smooth cheeks. I attached the photo to a Popsicle stick. Then, every morning, for an hour while I fed him breakfast, I’d hold the photo in front of my face like a mask. I made holes for the eyes and mouth. He seemed a little weirded out.