The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

by A. J. Jacobs

  "That's the entire Samaritan community in 1914," says Benyamim, "One hundred forty-six people."

  The current population has grown to all of seven hundred Samaritans, he says. Which is still an astounding statistic. Seven hundred people. His whole ethnic group could be comfortably seated in a high-school auditorium.

  Think of it this way: Benyamim tells me about how a Samaritan mother recently gave birth to severely premature twins. They survived-- but if they had died, Benyamim says, it would have been the equivalent of "wiping out your Kansas City."

  The seven hundred remaining Samaritans either live near Benyamim--in a city called Holon--or in the West Bank. Neither Israeli nor Palestinian, they feel slightly out of place in modern-day Israel, trying to remain friendly with both sides. As Benyamim puts it, "We dodge the political raindrops."

  They weren't always such a minority. The Samaritans--who trace their descent to ancient Samaria, which was in northern Israel--reached a peak in the fourth century BC with more than a million followers. They were wiped out in the centuries that followed by Romans, Ottomans, and the plague. Benyamim and his fellow Samaritans believe that they are one of the lost tribes of Israel, upholding the true biblical tradition.

  "Should we take a walk?" asks Benyamim.

  We step outside and into the Samaritan enclave--a quiet little maze of backstreets. We see no one except for a half dozen teenagers playing soccer and a neighbor out for a late-night errand. Benyamim points out that each house's exterior has a stone tablet with a biblical passage carved into it, their way of writing on doorposts.

  About three blocks from Benyamim's house, we arrive at the Samaritan temple--a squat white-walled structure--which is closed for night. But inside, says Benyamim, is the Samaritan Bible.

  It's a fascinating thing, the Samaritan Bible. Because it's almost exactly like the Hebrew Bible--with one key difference. The Ten Commandments aren't the ten that we know. Instead, one of the commandments tells followers to build an altar on Mount Gerizim, which is located on the West Bank. To the Samaritans, Mount Gerizim is the most sacred place in the world, the mountain where Noah beached his ark, where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son.

  To this day, it is the site of their annual lamb sacrifice. Yes, unlike the Jews, the Samaritans still practice animal sacrifice. Every year on their Passover, the head of each Samaritan household slits the throat of a sheep. Then all the sheep--about forty of them--are skinned, put on stakes, and roasted over pits for eating.

  "It's a beautiful ceremony," says Benyamim. "The smell is delicious. It's next week--you should come."

  I had enough trouble with the chickens.

  "I'll be back in New York, I'm afraid."

  When we get back to the house, Benyamim introduces me to his wife, a short-haired woman who, frankly, doesn't seem in the mood to chat with me. She nods her head, and that's about it. Benyamim's wife is a convert from Judaism. Apparently there are a sprinkling of Jewish women who make the switch, but not too many. As one commentator points out, the Samaritans' superstrict menstruation laws are a hard sell.

  "In the Torah, a woman in her period has to be departed," says Benyamim. This is why, he explains, Samaritan houses have a special room for women in their cycle. "My wife has her own TV and small refrigerator. It's like a hotel room."

  Can she come out?

  "Yes, and we can talk, but not face to face, because of the saliva. And we do talk. Mostly about my cooking."

  Benyamim must cook the meals, since his wife cannot touch the food. Benyamim tries to put an upbeat gloss on it: It's a vacation from household chores for the women.

  "Fifty years ago, there was a special tent for the women. And I believe it was the happiest tent in the camp."

  I don't know. I still have trouble accepting the menstrual laws, whether Jewish or Samaritan.

  Before I leave, I ask the obvious question: What do the Samaritans think about the parable of Good Samaritan? Well, not surprisingly, they don't object. They like it. There is even a Samaritan-owned Good Samaritan Coffee Shop in the West Bank.

  Benyamim tells me he has given Jesus's parable a lot of thought and has his own take on it: It was autobiographical. Benyamim believes that the wounded man is meant to represent Jesus himself. And Jesus chose to have a Samaritan rescue him because he'd had a good experience in Samaria. When Jesus fled the Pharisees and passed through Samaria, the locals treated him kindly and believed he was the savior (John 4).

  On the cab ride back to the hotel, my mind keeps coming back to the Samaritan Bible. So similar, but so different, too. What if history had taken a left turn? What if the Samaritan Torah had become the standard, and millions of Semitic faithful flooded to Mount Gerizim every year to sacrifice lambs, except for a few hundred people called the Jews, who worshipped at an obscure site known as the Western Wall?

  I give thanks to thee, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify thy name for ever.

  --PSALMS 86:12

  Day 204. I can't stop thinking about the two praying guys in Yossi's story: the one who emerges refreshed and the one who emerges more harried than before. Sometimes I'm the first guy, sometimes the second.

  Today I'm taking a rest from a walk on a set of stairs near the Jaffa Gate. Or maybe near the Lion's Gate. I'm not sure. Frankly, I'm lost. But I'm resting here on the stone steps, which are cool and shaded and have a bumpy surface that makes them look like a Rice Krispies treat.

  I have my head bowed and my eyes closed. I'm trying to pray, but my mind is wandering. I can't settle it down. It wanders over to an Esquire article I just wrote. It wasn't half bad, I think to myself. I liked that turn of phrase in the first paragraph.

  And then I am hit with a realization. And hit is the right word--it felt like a punch to my stomach. Here I am being prideful about creating an article in a midsize American magazine. But God--if He exists--He created the world. He created flamingos and supernovas and geysers and beetles and the stones for these steps I'm sitting on.

  "Praise the Lord," I say out loud.

  I'd always found the praising-God parts of the Bible and my prayer books awkward. The sentences about the all-powerful, almighty, allknowing, the host of hosts, He who has greatness beyond our comprehension. I'm not used to talking like that. It's so over the top. I'm used to understatement and hedging and irony. And why would God need to be praised in the first place? God shouldn't be insecure. He's the ultimate being.

  Now I can sort of see why. It's not for him. It's for us. It takes you out of yourself and your prideful little brain.

  Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the sabbath . . . --EXO D U S 31:16

  Day 205. As I wander over to a cafe near the hotel for a bagel, I realize something: Walking around Jerusalem in my biblical persona is at once freeing and vaguely disappointing. In New York--even though it's home to the Naked Cowboy and Gene Shalit--I'm still unusual enough to stand out. But in Israel I'm just one of the messianic crowd. A guy with strange outfits and eccentric facial hair? Big deal. Seen three dozen today. Jerusalem is like the Galapagos Islands of religion--you can't open your eyes without spotting an exotic creature.

  Speaking of which, it's Friday. The day I'm finally going to meet him, the most exotic creature of my family, the official black sheep, the man who gave me the germ of the idea for this book: Guru Gil.

  When I called up Guru Gil a couple of weeks ago, he said he wanted to meet me at the Western Wall, the holiest site for Jews in Jerusalem. He's there every day. I arrive on a drizzly, chilly Friday afternoon. It's an amazing place: dozens of mostly Orthodox Jews chanting and swaying, their fringes swinging, some so deep in ecstatic prayer that they are clenching their fists and shuddering. It's impossible not to be moved by the combined kilowatts of faith.

  Gil is nowhere to be found. When I ask his whereabouts, I discover that my family isn't the only one with mixed feelings about Gil. An Orthodox man from the Netherlands tells me that he and Gil no longer speak. What's the feud about? He
won't say. But whatever Gil did, he did "these things again and again and again!"

  Finally I spot Gil. I recognize him from the many, many photos on the cover of his book. He's walking down the steps, his long beard forked in half by a headwind, a big white tuft blowing over each shoulder.

  "Gil? It's A. J. Jacobs."

  "You're A. J? You look so religious," he says, eyeing my beard. "I was expecting something else."

  "Well, it's not as long as yours."

  "You'll get there," says Gil.

  He's smaller than I thought. Somehow, in my mind, thanks to years of family legends, he had grown into a Paul Bunyanesque super-Jew. But in real life, he's far south of six feet. And with the beard, he looks his sixty years.

  I tell him I'm in the middle of reading his book.

  "In the middle of it? Well, you're the first person to ever put it down."

  I can't tell if he's joking or if he's actually offended.

  He grabs a chair and a prayer book, and we sit down to worship next to the sixty-foot wall. It turns out that this is Gil's second trip to the wall today. Every day he wakes up at 1:45 a.m., takes a ritual bath, then arrives at the wall at 3:00 a.m. He stays there for a few hours, wrapping tefillin--the leather prayer straps--on willing tourists, then goes home for study, only to return in the afternoon. If you think, as I did, that 1:45 a.m. is an ungodly hour, you'd be wrong. At least according to Gil, the most spiritual time of day is midnight to eight.

  After an hour or so of prayers, we head back to Gil's apartment for Shabbat dinner. His guests arrive a few minutes later.

  "Come in and sit down," he says sternly. "You're late."

  Gil's dinner is quasifamous, a minor tourist attraction for students and seekers. Tonight we've got a couple of Russian yeshiva students, a pair of rabbi's daughters from Jersey, an Orthodox shrink and his wife, and this spaced-out Berkeley dude in a rainbow-colored yarmulke. Gil warned the Berkeley dude not to hit on the rabbi's daughters, or "I'll break both your legs."

  "Hello?" shouts Gil, after we're seated. "Shut up! Earth to people! Earth to people!"

  We stop chattering. Time for the ground rules.

  "Whoever asks the most questions gets the biggest dessert. But they have to be good questions. They can't be 'What's for dessert?'"

  Gil runs the dinner like he's still head of his yurt cult in upstate New York. Though nowadays he talks. And during two minutes of the introductory prayers, no one else does--or else you have to go wash your hands, as required by Orthodox custom.

  He looks at the Berkeley dude.

  "Are you going to talk?"

  "Uh . . . no."

  "You just did. Go wash your hands."

  The Berkeley dude is already walking on eggshells. He was the first guest to arrive and made the mistake of touching his cutlery prematurely, prompting Gil to snap, "Stop with the plates, stop with the spoon, knock it off!"

  Not wanting to make eye contact, I glance at the surroundings. The dining room table takes up most of the floor space. The walls are filled with photos of white-bearded rabbis. In the corner, I spot a snapshot of Gil playing a . . . ten-string harp. Yes, one alarmingly like mine. Gil tells me later that he designed the harp himself. "I based the notes on the sounds of a Hawaiian waterfall," he says.

  One of Gil's big themes is that everything has a reason. Julie has the same point of view, but Gil takes it to the extreme: Absolutely nothing is an accident. A few years ago, he tells us, he got bird droppings on his tefillin. He was devastated. "I thought, 'God hates me! He hates my prayers. All these years I've been trying to please him, this is how he feels about me.' He took the tefillin to an expert, and it turned out that one of the parchments was upside down. God didn't hate him--He was just letting him know.

  Each of the Bible's laws has a reason, too. A perfectly rational explanation.

  "I thought some of them we don't know the reason for," I say. "Whoever told you that wasn't a deep person," says Gil. And remember, the little rules are just as important as the big ones.

  "If you were in medical school to study brain surgery, would you want to follow all the rules? Or just the 'main ones'?" asks Gil.

  One of the rabbi's daughters has a question:

  "Why is it important for a guy to have a beard?"

  "Because Abraham had a beard."

  "He also had two wives," replies the rabbi's daughter.

  "I beg your pardon. One was a concubine."

  "Solomon had seven hundred wives," I pipe up.

  "Shut up," says Gil. "In those days you could. But since it was going to be forbidden later, Jacob was buried with Rachel, not his other wives."

  The rabbi's daughter isn't satisfied. Gil tries again:

  "If you see a guy with a long beard, you know he's not a warrior. There's no way. You can't fight with one of these things. The first they'd do is grab your beard. It's a handle on your head."

  That is one I hadn't heard. Gil takes a big swig of his red wine, about half of which dribbles into his beard. He gets up to clear the first course, a vegetable soup. The chatter at the table devolves to whom we know in common. Gil comes back. He is not well pleased.

  "Only holy topics!"

  "But what is holy?" says one of the twentysomething Russians. "Every topic can be holy."

  This guy had given Gil some lip earlier in the night--he kept asking to sing a Russian song--and now Gil has had enough.

  "You have no idea how hot things can get around here," Gil thunders. "One time, I had a guy from a yeshiva sitting right over there, and he was giving me a hard time. And I said, 'Look, I have two black belts in judo.'

  "And you know what the guy says?

  " 'Oh, yeah? I know martial arts too.'

  "So I jump up and grab him in a choke hold, and he turns blue in the face and goes 'Ahhhggghghh!' And I let go, and from then on, he was the sweetest guest I ever had.

  "Don't . . . push . . . the . . . buttons, kid. OK?"

  The Russian says nothing.

  I decide that Gil's shtick is part bully, part vaudevillian, part charismatic leader. He's an ultrareligious Donald Trump, and this is his boardroom. Maybe because I'm ex-family, I never get fully shellacked. He doesn't call me "klutz" or "idiot," as he does the others. The most I got is a "bozo!" when I wash my hands incorrectly.

  I can see how he was a cult leader. You can't take your eyes off him. When he's telling a story, he'll jump out of his wicker chair to preach an important point. He'll laugh for no apparent reason--during prayers, he just started giggling, his face reddening, apparently filled with the joy of God. He also weeps. He was talking about a rabbi he knew, stopped midsentence, looked away, and cried for a good minute, as the rest of us silently contemplated our wineglasses.

  He talks about his days as a cult leader only occasionally. At one point he grouses about the burden of having forty servants. "You know what I said every day? 'God, get them out of here!' What a pain in the tuchus to have to tell forty people what to do."

  When he finds out that one of the girls speaks American Sign Language, he boasts of the sign language he invented as a cult leader--and how it swept New York in the 1970s.

  "I found that a lot of my signs were the same as deaf sign language. Like the word understand."

  Gil puts two of his fingers on his palm.

  "You just did the sign for toast," says the girl.

  Gil shrugs.

  "Well, it wasn't the most important thing that I invented in my life."

  At about nine o'clock, Gil says it's nearing his bedtime, so we say the final prayers and pass around a cup of water for hand washing. At least the men do. When the shrink's wife tries to, Gil explodes.

  "Ahhhhhhh! Ahhhh!! No woman will wash hands at my table!!!"

  Gil is not a feminist. He calms down, tries to soften it.

  "No foxy woman, anyway. A short, fat woman, yes."

  I look at the shrink's wife, a sixtyish woman who would fit in well at a Palm Beach bingo game. She isn't in the tradi
tional sense foxy.

  "Why not women?" she asks.

  "Because you'll give this guy bad dreams!" says Gil.

  He points at me. I smile weakly.

  After the hand-washing incident, I get ready to go. Gil grabs my hand, looks me in the eyes, and says, "I love you." Oh man, my family would have a heart attack if they heard that one. How to respond?

  "Uh . . . thanks for dinner!" I say.

  As I walked down the cobblestone streets of the Old City, I remembered that Gil, when he first met my aunt Kate at a party, said those same words: "I love you." I can understand my grandfather's alarm. I sure wouldn't want my daughter marrying the Guru Gil of the twentyfirst century.

  Granted, he didn't end up strangling that Russian. In fact, he seems to me more of a religious clown than a felon. And I even agreed with a couple of his teachings. This one seemed kind of wise: "Whenever you're sad, things aren't working out for you, look around, see if there's someone else in trouble, go and help them. And I promise you, I promise you, I promise you, your problems will be solved."