Funny and poignant, a normal guy's attempt to tackle the whole Bible in one year.
Quotes:
As I read, I type into my PowerBook every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, every nugget of advice I find in the Bible. When I finish, I have a very long list. It runs seventy-two pages. More than seven hundred rules. The scope is astounding. All aspects of my life will be affected—the way I talk, walk, eat, bathe, dress, and hug my wife.
“You just have to tell them that you have a hunger and a thirst. And you may not sit at the same banquet table as them, but you have a hunger and thirst. So they shouldn’t judge you.” I love the way he talks. By the end, perhaps I’ll be able to speak in majestic food metaphors like Reverend Richards.
Inspired by my ex-uncle Gil, I had purchased some tassels from a website called “Tassels without Hassles.”
Inspired by my ex-uncle Gil, I had purchased some tassels from a website called “Tassels without Hassles.” They look like the kind of tassels on the corners of my grandmother’s needlepoint pillows.
When it comes to the Bible, there is always—but always—some level of interpretation, even on the most seemingly basic rules.
There is an upside to the Bible’s infertility motif: The harder it was for a woman to get pregnant, the greater was the resulting child.
I’ve rarely said the word Lord, unless it’s followed by of the Rings. I don’t often say God without preceding it with Oh my.
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.
The strictest Sabbath keepers today are probably the Orthodox Jews. In postbiblical times, the rabbis wrote down a complex list of forbidden behavior. It’s got thirty-nine types of work, including cooking, combing, and washing. You can’t plant, so gardening is off-limits. You can’t tear anything, so toilet paper must be pre-ripped earlier in the week. You can’t make words, so Scrabble is often considered off-limits (though at least one rabbi allows Deluxe Scrabble, since the squares have ridges, which provides enough separation between letters so that they don’t actually form words).
The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment. Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that.
He is serious. This isn’t a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him.
The Bible is right: A deluge of images does encourage idolatry. Look at the cults of personality in America today. Look at Hollywood. Look at Washington. I’d like to see the next presidential race be run according to Second Commandment principles. No commercials. A radio-only debate. We need an ugly president. I know we’re missing out on some potential Abe Lincolns because they’d look gawky and gangly on TV.
The outer affects the inner. Behavior shapes your psyche as much as the other way around.
This is what the Sabbath 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 Julie come home. I call out
This is what the Sabbath 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.
I still can’t wrap my brain around the notion that God would change His mind because we ask Him to. And yet I still love these prayers. To me they’re moral weight training.
The point is, I don’t see the world as a collection of soulless quarks and neutrinos. At times—not all the time, but sometimes—the entire world takes on a glow of sacredness, like someone has flipped on a unfathomably huge halogen lamp and made the universe softer, fuller, less menacing.
When will it sink into my skull that there is no such thing as an obscure Bible verse?
The Tiffany of ten-string harps is an Indiana-based shop called Jubilee Harps. (Motto: “Home is where your harp is!”)
a white-haired man near Rockefeller Center started yelling at me. “A ten-string harp? The Bible actually says an eight-string harp, not a ten-string harp!” He could have been playing with my mind, or he could have been your garden-variety crazy, hard to tell.
I used to order kosher meals on airplanes because someone told me that they were better—the reasoning was that the airlines have to give the kosher meals special attention and can’t throw them in the vat with everyone else’s slop.
That’s the paradox: I thought religion would make me live with my head in the clouds, but as often as not, it grounds me in this world.
I found a tremendously disturbing Food and Drug Administration website that lists the “natural and unavoidable” amounts of insects for every kind of food. One hundred grams of pizza sauce can have up to thirty insect eggs. One hundred grams of drained mushrooms may contain twenty or more maggots. And if you want oregano on your mushroom pizza, you’ll be enjoying 1,250 or more insect fragments per 10 grams.
My only other brush with tefillin was a book I was sent a few years ago at Esquire. It was by Leonard Nimoy—Star Trek’s Spock himself—who, as it turns out, is also a photographer and a quasireligious Jew. His book contained racy black-and-white photography of half-nude women wrapped in tefillin, a sort of Mapplethorpe-meets-Talmud motif. (Brief but relevant side note: You know Spock’s famous split-fingered “Live long and prosper” salute? It’s actually a sacred hand position used by the Jewish priestly class, the kohanim.)
Here, at the halfway mark of my journey, I’ve had an unexpected mental shift. I feel closer to the ultrareligious New Yorkers than I do the secular. The guy with the fish on his bumper sticker. The black man with the kufi. The Hasidim with their swinging fringes. These are my compatriots. They think about God and faith and prayer all the time, just like I do.
Stop looking at the Bible as a self-help book.
My quest is a paradoxical one. I’m trying to fly solo on a route that was specifically designed for a crowd.
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 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.
These people have perfected the art of ignoring the homeless. Their body language is very clear: “I am unable to look up for even a second because I am so deeply involved in observing this discarded Tropicana pineapple juice carton on the track.” It’s heartbreaking.
The law of fair weights and measures appears an impressive six times in the Bible. By way of comparison, the passages often cited to condemn homosexuality: also six.
Passover. If you’re even remotely Jewish, you know it as the religiously themed, springtime version of Thanksgiving.
Passover. If you’re even remotely Jewish, you know it as the religiously themed, springtime version of Thanksgiving. And if you’re Christian, you probably know it, at the very least, as the meal that Jesus was eating at the Last Supper.
I’ve learned that men of my vintage aren’t having a whole lot of sex. I think I’m hanging out with too many new fathers.
I could adopt the cognitive-dissonance strategy: If I act like Jesus is God, eventually maybe I will start to believe that Jesus is God. That’s been my tactic with the God of the Hebrew Bible, and it’s actually started to work.
That’s the big secret: The radical wing of the Christian right is a lot more boring than its liberal detractors would have you believe.
I hope Ralph’s right. I hope the Bible doesn’t endorse gay bashing.
I call Greenberg. He has plenty to say about the Bible and homosexuality. But the point I find most fascinating is this: God and humans are partners in a quest to reveal new meanings of the Bible. The letters of the Bible are eternal, but not its interpretation.
There are always two active parties. We must have reverence and awe for God, and honor for the chain of tradition. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use new information to help us read the holy texts in new ways.
It’s an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I’ve never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.
I keep a record of wrongs. It’s in my Palm Treo in a file I’ve labeled “Stuff.”
The Catholic and Lutheran services I’ve been to have been like well-orchestrated Bach concertos. This is like Ornette Coleman free jazz. All spontaneous.
I snap myself out of it. It was too much. How could I come back to New York and tell Julie I was saved at a serpent-handling church in Tennessee? I force myself back down. I’m not ready to surrender yet.
The only genuine-ish biblical robe that didn’t cost several hundred dollars was at a Halloween costume store. There it was, next to the Roman emperor togas: a shepherd’s robe.
“Let me drop an atom bomb on you,” said this Karaite; his name is Nehemiah Gordon, and he runs the Karaite website, the Karaite Korner. “You can’t follow all of the Bible literally because we can’t know what some of the words mean.”
The Bible may have not been dictated by God, it may have had a messy and complicated birth, one filled with political agendas and outdated ideas—but that doesn’t mean the Bible can’t be beautiful and sacred.
If you try to literally follow Leviticus 19:18—“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—well, you can’t.
“C. S. Lewis said the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive.” In short, pretending to be better than you are is better than nothing.
As you probably know, the most important part of a modern bar or bat mitzvah isn’t the Torah portion or lighting the candles, it’s the theme. You’ve got to have a theme: sports, Camelot, whatever.
So at this suburban Jersey country club, my son’s hands locked around my neck, his head pressed against my shoulder, I chose to accept this feeling and ride it to the end. To surrender. If I had to label it, I’d say the feeling is part love, part gratefulness, part connectedness, part joy.
Driving back to New York, I ask myself, why did that just happen? Did it have something to do with my frazzled state after Nancy’s death? Maybe. Was it because my project is about to end, and I forced myself into the state? Yeah, probably. But even if it was manufactured, it was still real.
The year showed me beyond a doubt that everyone practices cafeteria religion. It’s not just moderates. Fundamentalists do it too.
But the more important lesson was this: there’s nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren’t bad per se. I’ve had some great meals at cafeterias. I’ve also had some turkey tetrazzini that gave me the dry heaves for sixteen hours. The key is in choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones (compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones. Religious leaders don’t know everything about every food, but maybe the good ones can guide you to what is fresh. They can be like a helpful lunch lady who—OK, I’ve taken the metaphor too far.
The first is from the pastor out to pasture, Elton Richards. Here’s his metaphor: Try thinking of the Bible as a snapshot of something divine. It may not be a perfect picture. It may have flaws: a thumb on the lens, faded colors in the corners. But it still helps to visualize.
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