The New Jew Canon: God: A Biography

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or email.

Title: God: A Biography Author: Jack Miles Description: Richard Dawkins somewhat famously describes God as a "misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." He's not such a fan. If you want a more nuanced view of God, I loved God: A Biography by Jack Miles. It's an amazing work. Miles decides to analyze God in the way you'd analyze the main character of a great work of literature. The portrait that emerges is of an evolving God, a complex and fascinating God, a God with the capacity for both mercy and swift judgment. Miles doesn't whitewash the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, but he doesn't take the Dawkins character assassination route either. Recommended By: AJ Jacobs is editor at large at Esquire magazine and has contributed to The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, and Jewcy. He is the bestselling author of The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, earning him the self-proclaimed status of human guinea pig.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or tips. For more New Jew Canon recommendations, visit Jewcy's New Jew Canon Listmania.

In my year of living biblically, perhaps the hardest commandment for me to obey was Exodus 20:8: Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. I'm a lifelong workaholic. I check my emails about as often as I inhale. So for the first few weeks of my year, I blew it. I broke the sabbath repeatedly, barely making it an hour after sundown before succumbing to work.

Oddly, it was one Tuesday morning that fate gave me my first true taste of Shabbat. It was an enforced shabbat, a midweek Shabbat, but it was powerful nonetheless.

Here's what happened: the doorknobs in our apartment fall off on an alarmingly regular basis. They’re mercurial little suckers. We don’t even need to be touching them – it’s more of a natural-life-cycle type of situation, like icebergs calving or my hairline retreating. I’ll be in bed, reading my Bible, and I’ll hear a thud, and know that another doorknob succumbed to gravity.

Usually, I screw the knob back on. Problem solved – for a week or two, anyway. No big deal. But this morning, it became a big deal. At 9:30, I stop typing my emails and shuffle over to the bathroom – and close the door behind me. I don’t realize what I’ve done until I reach for the nonexistent inside doorknob. It had molted sometime during the night.

For the first ten minutes, I try to escape. I bang on the door, shout for help. No answer. Julie was away at a meeting and Jasper was out with his babysitter. I’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven, so I know to look for the grill in the ceiling that I could unscrew, climb into, slither through an air chute, drop into my neighbor’s bedroom, make a clever comment like “just thought I’d drop in,” and then return home. No grill. I’m trapped.

The next half hour I spend going through a checklist of worst-case scenarios. What if I slip, cut my forehead on the bathtub, bleed to death, end up on the front page of The New York Post? What if there’s a fire and I’m forced to hang by my fingernails from the window ledge?

Even more stressful to me is that the outside world is speeding along without me. E-mails are being answered. Venti lattes are being sipped. George Bush’s childhood friends are being appointed to high-level positions.

At 10:30, the phone rings. I hear a muffled voice leaving a message. This almost qualifies as human interaction. At 10:35, I make a pledge to myself to put more reading material in the bathroom if I ever escape. A Bible would have been nice. I’m stuck with an old Levenger catalog and a candle with a Omar Khayyam poem on the side: “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou.” Khayyam seems to be taunting me. I don’t have a jug of wine, or a loaf of bread or thou. I have a tube of Neutrogena shaving cream and some towels. That’s not paradise enou’.

By 11:00, I’ve become the world’s greatest expert on this bathroom. I know the fake marble tiles with their spider-vein pattern and the power outlet that is rakishly diagonal. I spend half an hour tidying the medicine cabinet. I notice that the ingredients in ChlorTrimeton go all the way from A (acacia) to Z (zein), which, as a former encyclopedia reader, appeals to me.

By noon, I’m sitting on the floor, my back against the shower door. I sit. And sit some more. And something odd happens. I know that, outside the bathroom, the world is speeding along. That blogs are being read. Wild salmon is being grilled. Reggaeton is being explained to middle-aged white marketing executives.

But I’m okay with it. It doesn’t cause my shoulders to tighten. Nothing I can do about it. I’ve reached an unexpected level of acceptance. For once, I’m savoring the present. I’m admiring what I have, even if it’s 32 square feet of fake marble and a tilted electrical outlet. I start to pray. And, perhaps for the first time, I pray in true peace and silence --without glancing at the clock, without my brain hopscotching from topic to topic.

This is what Shabbat should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just a lowering of the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.

At about 1:30, I hear my wife Julie come home. I call out and pound on the door.
“Where are you?”
“In here. In the bathroom.”
I hear her footsteps approaching. .
“You can’t get out?”
“No, I can’t get out.”
“How long have you been in there?”
“Four hours.”
There was a pause. I knew she was weighing her options. A few months ago, when she had trouble opening our bedroom door, I had made her pretend she was in a prison movie and shout “Attica! Attica!”
Julie was the more mature of us. After a few seconds, she just opened the door. I am free. There were emails to return, calls to make. It’s kind of a shame.

There is at least one thing I like about the creationist worldview.

Before I get to that, let me back up. In my year of exploring the Bible and biblical literalism, I made a pilgrimage to the just-opened Creation Museum in Kentucky. For those who missed the recent spate of news stories, the Creation Museum is the $25 million museum founded by the evangelical Christian group Answers in Genesis, and devoted to proving the earth is 6,000 years young.

It’s a fascinating place. You can see a scale model of Noah’s Ark. You can watch animatronic dinosaurs playing next to animatronic cave people (they lived at the same time, in the creationist scenario). There’s a screening room with sprinklers to simulate the Flood.

There’s also a bookstore that includes such titles as Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study, which spends 300 pages outlining the brilliant engineering that made the famous boat possible. There are chapters on the ventilation system, on-board exercise for the animals and the myth of explosive manure gases.

The book is beautifully argued – and I don’t believe a syllable of it. Which I know is counter to my quest. I went down to the museum with an open mind, but while down there, I realized my mind wouldn’t open that far. I could understand being open to the existence of God and the beauty of rituals and the benefits of prayer. But the existence of a brontosaurus on the ark? And an earth that’s barely older than Gene Hackman? I have to go with 99 percent of scientists on this one.

That said, I did spend some time trying to imagine what it would be like to be a creationist. I tried a little method acting and put myself in the mind of someone who believes the earth was formed 6000 years ago. I couldn’t 100 percent believe, but for a few minutes, I almost believed it.

And it was an amazing experience. Most notably, I felt more connected. Consider this: If everyone on earth is descended from two identifiable people – Adam and Eve – then the “family of man” isn’t just a vague cliche. It’s true. The guy who sells me bananas at the deli on 81st street – he’s my cousin. Sure, you can have the same notion if you accept the reality that humans have evolved over several millennia. But it’s not nearly as concrete. The creationist mindset made me feel closer to my fellow humans. It made me want to invite strangers over to dinner.

I’ll never convert to creationism, but I have tried to keep that palpable sense of ‘we’re-all-related’ that came with it.

The Bible has nothing against polycotton T-shirts. Neither does it condemn lycra-Spandex combinations. But it does forbid the wearing of wool and linen jackets.

When I first started my year, I made a list of the Top Five Most Perplexing Rules in the Bible. One of them: The ban on wearing clothes made of mixed fibers. (Deuteronomy 22:11).It’s such an odd proscription, I figured there was zero chance anyone else in America was trying to follow it.

Of course, I was flat wrong.

My friend Eddy Portnoy – who teaches history at the Jewish Theological Seminary -- told me shatnez testers. Shatnez, he informed me, is the Hebrew word for mixed fibers. Specifically, wool and linen. That’s the forbidden combination, according to the Hebrew.

A tester will come to your home and inspect your shirts, pants, sweaters and suits to make sure you have no hidden mixed fibers.

I had my wardrobe tested by a shatnez expert. And he found that my wedding suit was, in fact, shatnez. I had to mothball it for the year.

Now it’s easy to chuckle at shatnez. And I did. But it also provides a fascinating entry point into a profound question: Should we ever follow completely bizarre and inexplicable traditions just because they have been followed for thousands of years? I think Zero Mostel sang a song about it in Fiddler on the Roof. Me? I don’t have no easy answers.

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.