The Year of Living Biblically Part 3

Oh, and my spiritual advisory board. I try to meet or talk with at least one sage per day. Today is a doubleheader. It starts with breakfast with my friend Roger Bennett.

Roger is a Liverpudlian who ends all conversations with "Rock on." He has about eight jobs--writer, doc.u.mentarian, foundation head, and so on--most of which have at least a vague connection to religion.

Roger doesn't mind that my morning rituals made me ten minutes late, but he does want to tell me something: "You're going into this thinking that it's like studying the sumo wrestlers in j.a.pan," Roger says. "You're saying to yourself, 'I won't really become one. I'll maintain my distance.'"

I start to protest. Roger continues.

"You're dealing with explosive stuff. People a lot smarter than you have devoted their lives to this. So you have to admit there is a possibility that you will be profoundly changed by the end."

He could be right. And it scares me. I hate losing control. I like to be in command of everything. My emotions, for instance. If I'm watching a love story, and I start to get too weepy, I'll say to myself: "OK, there's a boom mike right over Audrey Hepburn's head; see if you can spot its shadow," and that'll snap me out of the movie, and I'll regain my composure. I also spend a lot of time trying to control my health, mostly by fixating on germs. I have a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder (a disease that has, I'm afraid, become a bit trendy, thanks to Larry David, et al.). My medicine cabinet is packed with a dozen bottles of Purell at all times. I haven't touched a subway pole with my bare hands in a decade--I usually just plant my feet wide apart in the subway car and pretend I'm a surfer.

The problem is, a lot of religion is about surrendering control and being open to radical change. I wish I could stow my secular worldview in a locker at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and retrieve it at the end of the year.

After breakfast with Roger, I take a subway downtown to have lunch with the Brooklyn rabbi Andy Bachman at a diner. It's back-toback mentoring today. Andy's easy to relate to. He also grew up in a secular home, though that home was in Wisconsin (Jews there are known as the "frozen chosen," by the way). He was drawn to religion when he first saw the beautiful typography of the Talmud. He's youngish, fortytwo, and insists I call him Andy, which seems disrespectful, but I try.

"How's it going?" asks Andy.

I tell Andy about Mr. Berkowitz and the mixed-fiber inspection.

"I was riveted," I say. Maybe too riveted, actually. I know myself. I'm drawn to the weird. In my last book, on the encyclopedia, I made seven references to philosopher Rene Descartes's fetish for cross-eyed women, which I think and hope is a record.

"I'm worried I could spend the whole year on the strange parts of the Bible and neglect the parts about goodness and justice," I say.

Andy thinks about it for a half minute. He takes a sip of coffee.

"My advice is: Don't forget the prophets."

The prophets, he explains, are twenty extraordinary men and women found in the Hebrew Scriptures. They come onto the scene several hundred years after the age of Moses. By then, the Israelites were living in the Promised Land, but they'd botched it all up. They'd gotten corrupt and lazy. They were oppressing the poor just like their former masters in Egypt. The prophets were the Martin Luther Kings of their day, railing against the crooked system. Not so coincidentally, MLK liked to quote them--including Amos's amazing words: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream!"

"Try to make everything you do measure up to the moral standards of the prophets," Andy told me. "Remember what Micah said. He said that the animal sacrifices weren't important. The important thing is to 'Do justice. And to love mercy. And to walk humbly with your G.o.d.'"

. . . and he gave him a tenth of all.

--GENESIS 14:20 (JPS).

Day 14. Andy's correct, of course. I have to be more moral. I have to do something that would please the prophets. The next morning, I flip through my list of rules and find an excellent candidate on page twentyeight: Give away 10 percent of your income.

"I'm going to t.i.the," I announce to Julie over breakfast.

She seems concerned. In general, she's much more magnanimous than I am. She's a sucker for those charities that send you free sheets of return-address labels with little cartoons of a Rollerblading Ziggy, along with a heartbreaking brochure about lymphoma. I tell her it's emotional blackmail. She ignores me and mails them checks.

But even for Julie 10 percent is high, especially with Jasper and, we hope, another kid to come. She asks me whether I can count my literary agent's fee as a t.i.the. She's only half-joking.

Unfortunately, I doubt even the most brilliant rabbi could figure out a way to cla.s.sify International Creative Management as "the poor" (especially after the agents raised their commission to 15 percent a few years ago).

"Can you at least do 10 percent after taxes?" she says. That night, I call my spiritual advisory board to ask. I reach Elton Richards, the pastor out to pasture.

"You shouldn't get too legalistic with it," says Elton. "Give what you can afford. And then give some more. It should feel like a sacrifice."

I study my Bible for insight. It seems that in the time of ancient Israel--before the Romans took over--no one paid taxes per se. The t.i.thes were the taxes. And the t.i.thing system was as complicated as any 1040 the taxes. And the t.i.thing system was as complicated as any 1040 form. You gave portions to the priests, the temple keepers, the temple itself, the poor, the widows, and the orphans. So, I suppose, at least for now, after-tax t.i.thing is probably OK.

I calculate 10 percent of my projected salary. It's not a huge number--but that's precisely the problem. If I were making $10 million a year and had to give away one million, that'd be easier.

That night I spend three hours browsing a website called Charity Navigator. It's sort of a Zagat guide to aid organizations. (Even this leads to coveting--they list the salaries of these charity CEOs, and some break $500,000.) I settle on several organizations--Feed the Children and Save Darfur among them--and donate about 2 percent of my income. That's as much as I can do in one shot.

When the confirmation emails ping in, I feel good. There's a haunting line from the film Chariots of Fire. Chariots of Fire. It's spoken by Eric Liddell, the It's spoken by Eric Liddell, the most religious runner, the one who carries a Bible with him during his sprint. He says: "When I run, I feel His pleasure." And as I gave away money, I think I might have felt G.o.d's pleasure. I know: I'm agnostic.

But still--I feel His pleasure. It's a warm ember that starts at the back of my neck and spreads through my skull. I feel like I am doing something I should have been doing all my life.

On the other hand, like a hard sprint, the pleasure is mixed with pain. I have just carved off 2 percent of my salary, and I've got 8 percent left to go. So here's the mental strategy I've adopted: If it weren't for the Bible, I wouldn't be living a biblical year. I wouldn't have a book deal. No Bible, no income. So it's only fair to give 10 percent to G.o.d's people. It's the most righteous finder's fee around.

He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.

--PROVERBS 13:24.

Day 23. As I mentioned, one of my motivations for this experiment is my recent entrance into fatherhood. I'm constantly worried about my son's ethical education. I don't want him to swim in this muddy soup of moral relativism. I don't trust it. I have such a worldview, and though I have yet to commit a major felony, it seems dangerous. Especially nowadays. Within a couple of years, Jasper will be able to download Tijuana donkey shows on YouTube while ordering OxyContin from an offsh.o.r.e pharmacy.

So I want to instill some rock-solid, absolute morals in my son. Would it be so bad if he lived by the Ten Commandments? Not at all. But how do I get him there?

This morning, it's clearer than ever that I need help. I'm exhausted, a direct result of the fact that I'm the worst disciplinarian in America.

At about 2:00 a.m. Jasper woke up, so I let him climb into bed with me and Julie--already a sucker move. Instead of lulling him to sleep, this gave him lots of new activities. For instance, grabbing my sleep mask, pulling it away from my eyes till the elastic band is fully extended--a length of about two feet--then releasing it. The mask would shoot back onto my face with alarming force, producing an eye-watering snap. (Note: Contrary to what you might think, my sleep mask does not violate the Bible's prohibition against wearing women's clothes. It came in a box featuring a photo of a very masculine and well-rested man sleeping next to his attractive wife.) I told Jasper to stop, but my tone was about as menacing as Fred Rogers. So he did it again and again.

This is probably unbiblical. At the very least, my leniency is a violation of the Proverbs. The Proverbs are the Bible's collection of wisdom attributed to King Solomon, and they come down clearly on the side of disciplining kids. As in corporal punishment.

Proverbs 22:15: "Folly is bound up in the heart of a child; but the rod of discipline drives it far from him."

Proverbs 23:14: "Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from h.e.l.l." (KJV) Proverbs 23:13: "Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you beat him with a rod, he will not die."

Some Americans hew to these proverbs literally. Until 2005 you could buy "The Rod," a twenty-two-inch nylon whipping stick that sold for five dollars. It was the creation of an Oklahoma-based Southern Baptist named Clyde Bullock, who advertised it with the motto "Spoons are for cooking, belts are for holding up pants, hands are for loving, and rods are for chastening." He shut down the business partly because of an outcry from more liberal Christians and partly because he couldn't buy its cus.h.i.+oned grips anymore.

Other not-quite-as-literal literalists say paddles are an acceptable alternative. James Dobson--founder of Focus on the Family, the ultraconservative Christian group--recommends paddling, especially if you want to keep your hand as "an object of love."

I don't own a rod or a paddle. In fact, corporal punishment of any sort is deeply counter to my parenting philosophy. I've always considered walloping your kid the H-bomb of childcare--it's in the a.r.s.enal but shouldn't be deployed.

Even for Project Bible, I can't deploy it. At least not yet. I've reached my first limit. So what to do? I decided this is one of those times when I should fulfill the letter of the law, if not the spirit. It's better than fulfilling nothing at all.

A few days ago I Googled "flexible rod" and "soft rod," and, after sifting through several biblically questionable ads, I ended up ordering a very unmenacing Nerf bat. I try it today on Jasper. After dinner, he grabs a handful of nickels off the dresser and chucks them across the room.

So I take the Nerf bat and smack Jasper's b.u.t.t with it. I've never spanked him before, despite several temptations to do otherwise. When I swing my bat--even though it's spongy and harmless--I break some sort of barrier. I have now punished my son physically. It's an unsettling feeling. It drives home just how lopsided the relations.h.i.+p is: Parents have G.o.d-like physical dominance over their kids, at least when those kids have yet to hit p.u.b.erty.

Jasper seems undisturbed by all this. He responds by laughing hysterically, grabbing his Wiffle bat, and attempting to smack me back. So I'm basically sanctioning violence here.

The rod is a fiasco. But here's the thing: I agree with the gist of Proverbs. I need to discipline my son more. I need to give Jasper some tough love, dispense more time-outs, or risk having him turn into a three-foottall monster. Julie has become the family disciplinarian, which is causing tension in our marriage, as she's not fond of being the bad cop. I've got to get stricter.

Look at the example set by G.o.d. The G.o.d of the Bible treats his children--the human race--with both justice and mercy. Right now, I'm out of whack; I'm 10 percent justice and 90 percent mercy. If I had been in charge of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve would have gotten three strikes, then a fourth, then a stern warning, then had their bedtime moved up twenty minutes. G.o.d, as you know, kicked them out. As a sign of His compa.s.sion, he clothed them in animal skins before the eviction, but He still kicked them out.

Make me understand the way of thy precepts, and I will meditate on thy wondrous works.

--PSALMS 119:27.

Day 30. It's the end of month one. Physically I feel okay. The beard's itchiness has receded, and, at least for the moment, it looks more comparativeliterature-professor than guy-who-stopped-taking-his-meds.

As for my spiritual life, the word that comes to mind is disconnected. disconnected. I've been playing the role of the Bible Man for a month, but that's what it still feels like: a role. A character. Like the time at summer camp when I was twelve, and, for reasons I no longer remember, I adopted a deep Southern accent--a real Foghorn Leghorn tw.a.n.g--and spoke it exclusively for a month. I've been playing the role of the Bible Man for a month, but that's what it still feels like: a role. A character. Like the time at summer camp when I was twelve, and, for reasons I no longer remember, I adopted a deep Southern accent--a real Foghorn Leghorn tw.a.n.g--and spoke it exclusively for a month.

This biblical alter ego of mine is such a separate being, I've taken to calling him a different name: Jacob. It seemed the most natural choice; close but not identical. I've been observing this Jacob guy, studying him.

And here's what I've found: He, too, has a split personality. On the one hand, Jacob is much more moral than I am. He attempts to fulfill Leviticus 19:18--"Love your neighbor as yourself." Which means he's doing things like holding the elevator door for slow-moving pa.s.sengers. Or giving a buck to the homeless guy outside the Museum of Natural History who says he's seeking donations for the "United Negro Pizza Fund."

He pays attention to the hundreds of small, almost unnoticeable moral decisions we make every day. He turns off the lights when leaving the room. He refrains from gawking at odd-looking pa.s.sersby--the four-hundred-pound man, the guy with the banana-colored pants, the woman who's eight inches taller than her boyfriend--something that I, as a lifelong people watcher, would love to do. Jacob stares straight ahead like a Buckingham Palace guard.

He's not getting short-listed for the n.o.bel yet, but he's a better man than my secular self.

On the other hand, my alter ego Jacob is engaging in some deeply strange behavior. He says, "Maybe we could have lunch on the fourth day of the workweek," since "Thursday" is forbidden. It comes from the Norse G.o.d Thor.

He rubs a dab of olive oil in his hair each morning, as instructed by Ecclesiastes 9:8 ("let not oil be lacking on your head"), which leaves these unfortunate green stains on all my baseball hats.

And he's developed this byzantine method of paying our babysitter Des. The Bible says the "wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning," (Leviticus 19:13) so Jacob gives her cash every night. But my secular self needs to pay her by weekly check so that she can properly file for taxes. Which means that I have to ask that she bring all the cash back at the end of the week and exchange it for a check. I'm not sure this is helping anyone. Des has already started trying to slip out at night without saying good-bye to me/Jacob.

My alter ego's behavior points to one of the biggest mysteries of the Bible. How can these ethically advanced rules and these bizarre decrees be found in the same book? And not just the same book. Sometimes the same page. The prohibition against mixing wool and linen comes right after the command to love your neighbor. It's not like the Bible has a section called "And Now for Some Crazy Laws." They're all jumbled up like a chopped salad.

Maybe all will become clear by the end of the year. Maybe.

Month Two: October

Three times a year you shall celebrate a pilgrim feast to me. --EXO D U S 23:14 (NAB) --EXO D U S 23:14 (NAB) Day 31, morning. I spend a half hour checking airfares to Israel. I need to go this year. I can't devote twelve months to living biblically without making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the holy book itself.

I've been once before. When I was fourteen, my parents wanted to take us to Israel and Egypt, so we signed up for a tour group whose members consisted of my family, a couple of dozen retired orthodontists, and an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old woman who had been led to believe this would be a singles tour, which it was, if you count the high percentage of widows and widowers.

I don't remember much about the tour. I remember the long bus rides, with the Israeli tour guide asking, "Does anyone want to stop at the smile room?" That was Israeli tour guide slang for the bathroom, since "everyone smiles when they walk out of the smile room." I remember preferring the Egyptian portion of the trip; I'd always been fascinated by the pyramids and had some knowledge of the Nile culture, or had at least memorized the lyrics to Steve Martin's "King Tut" song.

But Israel itself made little impression at all on my secular mind. At the time, I was going through an ill-thought-out Marxist phase. Religion was the opium of the people. And not just that: I was sure the opium pushers--the rabbis, the bishops, the ministers--were in on the con and were only trying to pay for their Mercedes Benzes. Israel was the center of the corrupt system.

By default, this trip has to be more meaningful. Plus, it will give me a chance to meet my ex-uncle Gil. Yes, as in meet him for the first time. Here's the weird thing: He was married to my aunt for years, but I've never seen him face to face. The family considered him such an unstable character, such a fraud, that no one wanted him around at reunions or birthday parties. They didn't see him as a harmless eccentric. He was dangerous. There were rumors of his Svengali-like, abusive techniques when he was a cult leader.

The main strategy was to pretend that he didn't exist. In her semimonthly family newsletter, my grandmother couldn't even bring herself to type Gil's name. She referred to him only as "He." As in "He and Kate will be visiting in March," which I always found an ironic echo of the Orthodox refusal to write the name G.o.d (usually written G-d. G-d.) The only time I remember my grandmother mentioning Gil was when she talked about a disturbing conversation she'd had with Kate. "She told me she'd be happy to stare into his eyes all day," said my grandmother. "That's not how a marriage should be. You should be side by side, facing the world, not looking into each other's eyes all day." So Gil has always been this mysterious, forbidden, slightly scary figure to me.

Gil met Kate in 1982, and she became Orthodox soon after. I don't remember much about her from her pre-Gil life. I remember her waistlength hair (now tucked under a headdress), her creepy UFO-expert boyfriend, and her gift of a whoopee cus.h.i.+on she brought back from France, which I guess was way more sophisticated than any whoopee cus.h.i.+on that we yokel Americans could make.

I remember her giggling a lot. And she still does; Orthodox Judaism hasn't erased her sense of humor. She has a great, loud, whooping laugh. But her pa.s.sion nowadays is for two things: her four children and the Torah.

It's a tricky and guilt-inducing proposition, meeting Gil. The truth is, I'm rebelling against my family. No one wants me to meet him. Early on, my mom asked point blank: "You're not going to talk to Gil, are you?" I didn't answer.

She thinks that if I meet Gil, it'll give him some sort of legitimacy he doesn't deserve. I don't know about that. I don't think I'm in the position to bestow legitimacy on anyone. Regardless, I can't resist the chance to visit him. The man helped with the genesis of this quest. For better or worse, he could be a pivotal figure in my struggle to understand religion. At the end, I'll beg my family's forgiveness.

Blow the trumpet at the new moon . . .

--PSALMS 81:3.

Day 31, afternoon. The Bible commands me--or Jacob, or whoever I am--to blow a trumpet at the start of every month. (To be safe, I'm also blowing a trumpet at the start of every Hebrew month.) I find a ram's horn at the Jewish community center gift shop. It's a small shofar--thirty dollars will only get you so much--about three times the size of a kazoo and shaped like an elbow macaroni.

There's no doubt it's from a ram, though. It smells like a barn that hasn't been cleaned for days. I stand in my living room and blow. No sound. Just loudly exhaled air. These ram's horns are surprisingly hard to play. I'm still working under the a.s.sumption that the Bible didn't ban computers, so I spend half an hour on the internet picking up tips: * Separate the lips as if you were making a raspberry.

* Keep your jaw in the position you would if you were spitting a watermelon seed.

* Wet your lips-- * --but not too much.

* If you do wet them too much, spittle is best removed from the shofar by a coffee brush or an aquarium brush.

* Put the shofar in the corner of your mouth, not in the center.

I sip a gla.s.s of water, part my lips, jut out my jaw, and blow the shofar again. It sounds like a dying fax machine. But, I remind myself, I still have eleven more months.

I did a little research, and, as I suspected, I'm not alone. There are a handful of twenty-first-century people who also blow a trumpet to kick off each month. But they are admittedly on the religious fringe. Mainstream Judaism and Christianity have both discontinued the practice, along with the observance of hundreds of other obscure biblical rules. The reason?

Christians believe that Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice. His crucifixion made animal sacrifice unnecessary. And not just animal sacrifice, but many of the ceremonial laws of the ancient Hebrews. This is why Christians can eat bacon and shave their beards with impunity. And why they don't need to blow a trumpet to the new month.

Most--but not all--Christians draw a distinction between "moral laws" and "ritual laws." They still adhere to the Old Testament's moral laws, such as the Ten Commandments (and, sometimes, the ban on h.o.m.os.e.xuality), but they sc.r.a.p many of the ritual laws. Of course, there's a good amount of debate in Christianity over which should be considered moral laws and which ritual. Is the Sabbath a moral law? Or ritual? What about the ban on tattoos? I read a long tirade by one Christian against so-called Christian tattoo parlors.

There are dozens of rules that Jews no longer follow as well. The reason is different, though. According to Judaism, animal sacrifice can take place only at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. And when the temple was gone, so was the relevance of more than two hundred sacrifice-related rules. (Including blowing a trumpet to the new moon, which was originally done along with a sacrifice.) Plus, Americans are off the hook with regard to another forty-five laws that they believe apply only in the land of Israel--many of them dealing with agriculture.

When I started this project, I vowed to try to follow all the Bible's rules--ritual, moral, agricultural, and sacrificial--and see where it takes me. But, to use a food metaphor in honor of my adviser Pastor Richards, I think I've bitten off more than I can chew.

When a woman has a discharge of blood, which is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.

--LEVITICUS 15:19.

Day 34. In case you were wondering, Julie got her period yesterday-- which is bad news in two senses. First, it means that our attempt to be fruitful and multiply has failed yet again. Second, it ratchets up the biblical living to a whole new level of awkwardness.

The Hebrew Bible discourages the faithful from touching a woman for the week after the start of her period. So far in my year, adhering to this rule has been only mildly uncomfortable, nothing worse. In fact, it's got an upside: It dovetails quite nicely with my lifelong obsessive-compulsive disorder and germaphobia, so it's turned out to be a brilliantly convenient excuse to avoid touching 51 percent of the human population.

A female friend will come in for a cheek kiss, and I'll dart my head out of the way like Oscar de la Hoya. A colleague will try to shake my hand, and I'll step backward to safety.

"I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to."

"Oh. Um. OK."

Usually that's the end of it. Usually but not always. Consider this conversation I had with Julie's Australian friend Rachel, whom we met in Central Park last week.

"You're not allowed to? What do you mean?"

"Well, you might be . . . impure."

"What do you mean 'impure'?"