The Year of Living Biblically

Before and After: A.J. Jacobs, Bronze Age and Now Hello. Welcome to my guest-blogging stint.

I'm going to be blogging about my Judaism-heavy new book The Year of Living Biblically.

I wrote up an official introduction and everything. Which I'm pasting here:

For a long time, I thought that religion, for all the good it does, seemed too risky for our modern world. The potential for abuse too high. I figured it would slowly fade away like other archaic things. Science was on the march. Someday soon we’d all be living in a neo-Enlightenment paradise where every decision was made with steely, Spock-like logic.

As you might have noticed, I was spectacularly mistaken. The influence of the Bible -- and religion as a whole – remains a mighty force, perhaps even stronger than it was when I was a kid. So in the last few years, religion has become my fixation. Is half of the world suffering from a massive delusion, as Richard Dawkins and his posse say? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I’m missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love? And most important, I now have a young son – if my lack of religion is a flaw, I don’t want to pass it onto him.

Which is why I decided to dive in headfirst and try to understand the Bible from the inside. To try to follow every rule in the Bible. From the famous ones like the Ten Commandments and Love thy neighbor, right on down to the lesser-known ones – don’t shave your beard, don’t wear mixed fibers and, yes, stone adulterers. All 613 commandments (plus a handful of regulations from other parts of the Bible, such as the Proverbs and Psalms). I wanted to see how living by the biblical laws would change my life.

I chronicled my journey in my new book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally As Possible. It was an amazing year – life-altering, fascinating and very strange.

I found myself moved by the Prophets’ message of social justice, loving Shabbat, and, oddest of all for a lifelong agnostic, enjoying prayer. I also found myself wearing sandals, herding sheep and eating the occasional cricket.

I had a spiritual advisory board made up of rabbis of all varieties. They gave me a crash course in the oral law, and how it intertwines with the Bible itself. I did some mitzvahs in the traditional way – wrapping tefillin with the Orthodox, for instance. I embedded myself with groups ranging from Hasidic Jews to Israeli Samaritans. But there was also a big DIY element to my quest.

In addition to a spiritual journey, book is also an argument against fundamentalism. I became the ultimate fundamentalist to show the error of that approach. I hoped to show that fundamentalism and extreme literalism is necessarily selective, though fundamentalists won’t admit it.

In any case, every day for the next two weeks, I’m going to post something I learned on my odd and enlightening year. I’d love any feedback, of course. Here, the first installment:

Saying 'mazel tov' could, conceivably, get you executed.

I met with a leader of an ultra-literal branch of Judaism called Karaites. The movement was huge in the middle ages, but has now dwindled to 30,000 followers split between Israel and, weirdly enough, Daly City California. I told the Karaite "Mazel tov" on the completion of his doctorate. He shook his head. "Mazel tov means good constellation," he told me. And astrology is banned in the Bible (Leviticus 19:26). The punishment? Execution.