This year, one of my resolutions was to return to my roots, and become a bookworm once again. The time has come; I'm nearly two years out of graduate school now and no longer need to recoil at the thought of picking up a book. I used to love books. I need to rekindle that love. Thus, as a starting point to my year of reading frequently, I began with The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.
The book, written by cheeky Esquire columnist A.J. Jacobs, is an interesting journey. Jacobs does not begin the quest as a religious man; he describes himself as a Jew who is "as Jewish as the Olive Garden is Italian." He is confounded by the religious fervor that permeates our society, and decides to explore it for himself. However, rather than taking on contemporary or mainstream religious practices and incorporating them gingerly into his life, he decides to dive in to a full year of literally carrying out every law, no matter how obscure, found in the Bible. (Hey, makes for a more intriguing premise than The Year Of Gradually Trying to Understand Religion by Joining a Congregation and/or Incorporating Daily Prayer Time Into My Schedule, or The Year of Reading a Lot of Dusty Religious Tomes.)
Clearly, literally following all of the commandments found in the Bible is impossible. (Jacobs spends the majority of his year focusing on both the Hebrew Bible, though the last few months are dedicated to the New Testament.) However, even exempting the laws having to do with the ancient Temple, animal sacrifice, and so on, Jacobs has plenty of fodder for exploration. Some of his anecdotes are laugh-out-loud funny; some poignant; some borderline insane.
Jacobs himself is a neurotic narrator, alternatively likable and frustrating. His dry wit and tongue-in-cheek observations place the reader in a position of understanding what it must be like to be a generally-sensible, modern person living out generally-considered-archaic, ancient daily practices. However, his constant self-referential examples and interpretations, coupled with his frequent references to his obsessions with pop culture and the success of his writing (including this book) occasionally took me out of the narrative itself.
Nevertheless - his book benefits more than it suffers from his self-involvement. Jacobs' stories of his family members' reactions to his quest are priceless. Halfway through the book, I decided that his wife, Julie, is possibly the most patient spouse on the planet. Make no mistake - she fights back aplenty (one of my favorite passages is when, in observance of the laws of purity, Jacobs informs Julie he cannot touch her, or anything she has touched, while she is menstruating, because she is "unclean"; she promptly sits on every usable space in their apartment), but she sure puts up with a lot as her husband winds his way deeper and deeper into a life of literal Biblical living.
Clearly, the "spectacle" is what sells the book: the trials and tribulations of The Beard, the stoning of an adulter, the stereotypically-ancient-Israelite practices are the images conjured by the book's title. But what, really, is the thrust of the book? One individual's social experiment? A modern commentary on ancient customs? It's classified as a "Humor" book - so at the end of the day, is it all a big joke?
Ultimately, the book steers clear of providing any answers, which I think is wise. But even without offering answers, and even while quickly seasoning most of the touching revelations with healthy dashes of humor, the book raises important questions. It didn't leave this reader raring to go take up religion, but it did leave her thinking about spirituality, community, finding ways to consider incorporating tradition into our lives in meaningful ways. We don't live in biblical times, but we do live in complicated ones - and taking the opportunity to consider ways old and new to sort through the chaos seems wise. (Even if we don't take all the fashion risks Jacobs does.)
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