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| Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |
Bible Man
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
Journalist A.J. Jacobs immerses himself head first into his stories. For his latest book, he decided to shed his secularism and spend the entire year trying to follow every single law in the Bible as literally as possible. Adulterers, beware.
A.J. Jacobs spent a year adhering to Biblical law, but shortly after I meet him, he transgresses quite a few rules.
As I approach the table at a New York City restaurant where Jacobs is waiting, he shakes my hand -- a warm gesture, but one that is prohibited since I am a woman. Next, he slides into the booth, a seat that countless women have sat on, another no-no according to the Bible's strict purity laws. Did I mention that we've met on the Upper West Side at the Popover Cafe? It's a beloved neighborhood haunt, but decidedly not kosher.
To be fair, Jacobs has recently completed an experiment in which he followed a literal interpretation of the Bible, an adventure he chronicles in the aptly named book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. Still, I expect to see him in full biblical garb, including the shepherd's robe and staff he carried during the year. At the very least, I want a glimpse of his beard, which grew unfettered (a la ZZ Top), and of which Jacobs himself writes: "I have a beard that makes me resemble Moses. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Ted Kaczynski. I've been called all three."
But let me back up. A popular journalist who writes for Esquire magazine, Jacobs became interested in religion shortly after the birth of his oldest son, now three. A self-described agnostic, he began to wonder what he should teach his child about God. "As someone who grew up in an incredibly secular household," Jacobs says, "I was fascinated with this ancient system of beliefs that still held sway."
His easy smile growing earnest, he adds, "I definitely had that fear, like there's something wrong with me, that I was colorblind, or like someone who had never fallen in love."
But was half the world delusional, or was he? "I wanted to find out whether I was missing something," he says.
~ ~ ~
About a month before his book is released, I meet Jacobs for a late lunch not far from where he lives with his wife, Julie, and their three sons, three-year-old Jasper and one-year-old twins Zane and Lucas. Shaven and shorn, he is wearing white pants -- a vestige from his biblical year. He cites a verse in Ecclesiastes that states, "Let your garments be white," and adds, "Oh yeah, clothes make the man. The outer affects the inner."
I must have looked skeptical, because he continues. "When you're wearing white, you feel great, you feel like you're going to Wimbledon or P. Diddy's birthday party. You can't be in a bad mood. It's the equivalent of a sunny day."
But white pants were the tip of the iceberg during Jacobs' biblical year, when he devoted himself to following the Ten Commandments and a litany of other biblical edicts with often hilarious results. At times opting for Bible-themed activities, Jacobs eats locusts, plays the lyre, hires an intern whom he calls a slave, and burns myrrh that he bought from a store on the Upper West Side. He discreetly throws pebbles at a man he believes to be an adulterer and refuses to lie to Jasper, thereby unleashing a ferocious temper tantrum.
Having been raised in a secular home, where Yom Kippur meant having a "light lunch," Jacobs also takes field trips around the country and to Israel to learn how others express their religious values. Indeed, he finds himself dropping in on an evangelical Bible study class in New York, meeting a snake handler in Knoxville, Tenn., and attending a sermon at the Rev. Jerry Falwell's church in Lynchburg, Va.
To be sure, the lifestyle is completely contradictory to Jacobs' "real life," so to speak. This is, after all, a man whose day job requires him to interview beautiful female celebrities.
But Jacobs wisely consults a group of spiritual advisors during his journey, such as the kindly Mr. Berkowitz, an Orthodox Jew who calls him by his full name, Arnold, and tests his clothes for shatnez, or mixed fibers; his Uncle Gil, a religious guru who was a cult leader in the 1970s; and a host of rabbis and other religious figures.
Jacobs also relies on his family as integral cast members, sharing details of a failed attempt at disciplining his son, as well as the more intimate disclosure that he and his wife are trying to have more children.
"From the beginning, I became part of it," Jacobs' wife, Julie, tells me when I reach her by phone. "Some people marry men who are at the office all night long. I married a man who, as he now says, puts our lives into a laboratory." To be clear, Julie is the ying to A.J.'s yang. She says she is the more extroverted, he is more quirky. They met at Entertainment Weekly, where Julie worked in sales and marketing and A.J. was a writer (whose work Julie adored). Both have since moved on, A.J. to Esquire and Julie to a company that stages scavenger hunts, called Watson Adventures. "He had a crush on me for years," Julie jokes about their courtship.
She kids that Jacobs did not reveal all of his eccentricities, such as wearing earmuffs at the beach, until they were engaged and married. She laughs. "The quirks make him interesting, and opposites attract."
If his wife, A.J. acknowledges her powerful presence in his work, and says she is often the saint or heroine of the story. (Both A.J. and Julie tell me that Julie has the ultimate veto power, although she used it less in this book than she had in the past.)
For Jacobs, living in a self-imposed fishbowl is the best way to learn -- and to write -- about a topic. "It is true that I'm OK with exposing myself." Pause. "That came out wrong. I do not expose myself," Jacobs clarifies. Sobering quickly, he says, "I think everyone has flaws, everyone has good parts. Hopefully my good parts outweigh the bad. I put it out there and see what people think."
~ ~ ~
So far, people are fans of Jacobs' "good parts." Even before his book hits the shelves, it has already beenoptioned for a movie by Paramount Pictures.
"As he unfolded the scenario for me, I thought, 'He's the perfect person for this,'" says Rabbi Andy Bachman, the senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who met with Jacobs several times during the year and maintained regular phone contact with him. The two originally met at a conference several years ago, and they stayed in touch. "To be sitting in the front row when a young comic mind immerses himself in Western civilization's canonical text, the Bible, to probe its text, to me was a sheer joy," he says.
As a journalist, Jacobs has built a career out of immersion journalism, regularly subjecting himself -- and those around him -- to an array of first-person experiences. (On his Web site, he describes himself as "a New York Times best-selling author, Esquire editor and human guinea pig," which pretty much sums it up.)
Among his notable exploits: Jacobs has spent 24 hours in a Barcalounger, impersonated his nanny on an online dating service, and once, renounced all lying (even the little ones like, "No, you don't look fat,") to explore a movement called Radical Honesty. In one of his funnier articles, Jacobs described an experiment in which he outsourced his life to a service in India that took over his daily tasks, such as emailing his boss, reading to his son, and fighting with his wife. (The outsources were more effective in that department than he is, he admits.)
Following the release of his latest book, some reviewers called him a "stunt" journalist, but in another sense, reading his work is like talking to your nebbishy best friend, who happens to be hilarious.
On a basic level, Jacobs feeds off an intellectual curiosity of epic proportions. (When we meet for the first time, he peppers me with questions about myself before I turn the tape recorder back on him.) "I'm a generalist, I like huge topics," he says, "but that's what keeps me interested in them."
At Brown University, he studied philosophy, a discipline he enjoyed "in the sense that I felt I devoted four years trying to figure out the most basic questions." Graduation brought relief from those unanswerable queries, he laughs. Journalism seemed the next logical step, since as a profession it resembled a "continuing education." (Learning is a "very Jewish" trait, he adds.)
Early in his career, Jacobs cut his teeth as a reporter at a "tiny" newspaper outside of San Francisco called the Antioch Ledger Post Dispatch, before returning to New York. Back on the East Coast, he worked for Entertainment Weekly magazine and wrote about B-level stars for five years, he says. ("I caught colds from several celebrities, which I was very proud of," he adds.)
Since 2000, Jacobs has been the editor at large for Esquire magazine (a dream job, he says). His work has also been published in The New York Times and New York magazine. In 2004, he wrote The Know-It-All, a book that chronicled his experience reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.
"I'm never going to climb Mt. Everest and I'm never going to be an ice dancer in the Olympics," he says, when asked what fuels his drive to perform these experiments. "But I know that I can at least try to do these quests that will give me a sense of accomplishment that will be my intellectual Everest," he says.
~ ~ ~
Intellectual Everest, indeed. By the end of his first biblical week, Jacobs reports that he is still agnostic, his beard is itchy, and emotionally he feels "strung out."
As the year progressed, there were no shortage of challenges, he says, such as rules that prohibit lying, coveting, ("That was a constant battle"), and gossiping ("That's like 70 percent of my conversations. I couldn't talk.").
Jacobs also eschews an edict to wear white clothing, but learns that a white robe (which he purchases from a Halloween store) can be a polarizing garment. "At times I was treated as if I were a D-list celebrity -- two Austrian teenagers asked to have their photo taken with me," he writes. "At other times, I engendered not just the usual suspicion but flat out-hostility. As I was passing this man on the street, he looked at me, snarled, and gave me the finger."
And yet, Jacobs reaches a turning point more than halfway through the year -- on Day 237 to be exact. It comes unexpectedly, when his son, Jasper, falls and smacks his head. "It's a horrible moment -- and also a milestone of sorts," he writes. "My first reaction, as I was running to show Julie, was to pray to God for Jasper to be OK."
Asked today, Jacobs says his biblical research "changed me, definitely." A year after his experiment, he uses the term "reverent agnostic" to describe his religious state of being. He enjoys Jewish holidays and finds himself more thankful. He believes a literal translation of the Bible is far too extreme, but he wants to give his sons a Jewish education of sorts. He is also teaching them kindness because "that's the most important thing."
"I wanted to try to get to the biblical bedrock, to try to figure out what they did back in biblical times," he says, toward the end of our meeting, in describing the paradoxical nature of a literal interpretation of the Bible. "I realized, of course, that that's an impossible thing to achieve and the biblical bedrock doesn't exist and you certainly can't ever get to it because it's all about interpretations and levels of meaning."
--Text by E.B. Solomont / Photo by Michael Cogliantry
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
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