"Don"t worry," she says, recovering. "At least I didn"t get him the stuffed ten plagues."
Nancy is a good neighbor, probably the best I"ve had in my time as a New Yorker. I decide that this will be one of my missions for the year: Do something righteous--a good deed, a mitzvah mitzvah--for my neighbor in 5I.
"Therefore he may lie with you tonight in return for your son"s mandrakes." --GENESIS 30:15 (NAB) --GENESIS 30:15 (NAB) Day 87. As of this week, Julie and I have officially been trying to be fruitful and multiply for a year. Still no luck. So we"ve decided to take radical measures. We"re going to try in vitro fertilization.
This is more morally fraught than I had realized. Thanks to my religion-soaked life, I now know that several higher authorities condemn the procedure. The Catholic Church, for instance, denounces IVF for several reasons. Among them: it breaks what one Catholic magazine calls "the unity and integrity" of "conjugal fruitfulness." Which means that the conception takes place outside the woman"s body, not where G.o.d intended it.
On the other hand, most rabbis don"t have much of a problem with IVF--and some Jewish scholars even argue that "be fruitful and multiply" means that there"s a moral imperative to get pregnant by any means necessary. Which is why New York fertility clinics are often crowded with black hats and voluminous beards.
The Bible, of course, never addresses the issue directly. There"s nary a mention of IVF in Scripture, even by its long-forgotten name of "testtube baby." There is, however, a biblical story about fertility drugs--or their ancient equivalent, anyway. You remember Jacob, who was married to two sisters: Leah (the baby machine) and Rachel (the one with the barren womb). At one point, Rachel got so desperate, she pleaded with her sister for some mandrake. Mandrake is the forked Mediterranean root that was thought to be an infertility cure. Rachel got her mandrake, but the scheme backfired. Because Rachel, to secure the mandrake, had traded to Leah a night with Jacob--and on that very night, Jacob was apparently at maximum virility. Leah got pregnant. Rachel got nothing, at least for the time being. So . . . you could argue that the Bible subtly disapproves of fertility treatments.
But, honestly, that seems like speculation. If I take the Bible literally-- at its word--I can"t find any guidance pro or con.
So we"re going to try IVF. It helps that my new insurance plan covers it. And it helps, too, that we have a family connection to the procedure. My cousin David--now twenty-three--was the very first test-tube baby in New York State, and he got his little technologically a.s.sisted face on the cover of the Daily News. Daily News. He seems to have turned out all right. He fits in fine with my family--with the exception of my ultraliberal aunt Marti, who squabbles with him every time they"re in the same room. David, former president of his fraternity, likes manly things such as baseball and a big, juicy piece of meat. Marti does not. Whenever someone takes a family photo, she tells us all to say He seems to have turned out all right. He fits in fine with my family--with the exception of my ultraliberal aunt Marti, who squabbles with him every time they"re in the same room. David, former president of his fraternity, likes manly things such as baseball and a big, juicy piece of meat. Marti does not. Whenever someone takes a family photo, she tells us all to say "Soy cheese!" "Soy cheese!" which always prompts David to shout a gleefully malicious which always prompts David to shout a gleefully malicious "T-bone!" "T-bone!" (To be technical, Marti has since decided that soy causes health problems, so she now prefers us to say (To be technical, Marti has since decided that soy causes health problems, so she now prefers us to say "Vegan." "Vegan.") IVF is a startlingly complicated process. The buildup to the actual fertilization involves forty days of shots, pills, alcohol swabs, and a fearsome array of syringes. Granted, I get the better half of the deal. Julie actually has to be poked by a needle every day. But I do have to be her RN, mixing together white powders and sterile water in what seems the most stressful chemistry experiment of my life.
The first night, a Russian-accented nurse came to our apartment to show me how to inject my wife. She asked Julie to drop her pants and lean over. "It"s just like throwing a dart," the nurse told me. Though with this dart, you miss, and the target starts bleeding.
"Each night, you alternate cheeks--first right, then left, right, left." And, she advised, you have to make sure the needle hits the sweet spot of the upper b.u.t.t.
I don"t like vagueness. So I opened a drawer, took out a green magic marker, and requested the nurse to draw me the exact location of these "sweet spots" on Julie"s b.u.t.t. Which she did. And which helps me enormously. But not Julie. She complains that whenever she wears white pants, everyone can see two green orbs on her b.u.t.t.
"I hope this works," Julie told me yesterday. "Because I don"t think I can go through this again."
. . . For G.o.d is with the generation of the righteous. --PSALMS 14:5 --PSALMS 14:5 Day 91, the end of month three of Project Bible. Thanks to the beard, my alter ego Jacob is looking more and more religious. Or, to be precise, more and more Jewish. I know this because I was stopped by some tourists on the street the other day and asked "Where in New York can we get a good knish?" More to the point, I was told by a guy at the soup kitchen where I volunteer, "You look really Jewish." Hard to misinterpret that one.
On the other hand, my ethical state leaves much to be desired. This occurs to me as I am sitting on the crosstown bus today reading Ecclesiastes.
I"m concentrating hard. Too hard. I feel a tap on my shoulder. I"m annoyed. I don"t like strangers touching me. I look up. It is a fiftyish man.
"Excuse me, this lady is feeling sick. Could you give her your seat?" He points to a tall brunette woman who was standing right in front of me. How did I miss this? The woman looks horrible: Her face is sallow, nearly the color of lima beans. She is doubled over. And she is weeping.
I get up in a hurry with mumbled apologies. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there"s a time for reading and a time for getting off your b.u.t.t.
I realize that I was what is known in Hebrew as a Chasid Shote. Chasid Shote. A righteous idiot. In the Talmud, there"s a story about a devout man who won"t save a drowning woman because he"s afraid of breaking the notouching-women ban. He"s the ultimate pious fool. A righteous idiot. In the Talmud, there"s a story about a devout man who won"t save a drowning woman because he"s afraid of breaking the notouching-women ban. He"s the ultimate pious fool.
The moral is the same as Jesus"s parable about the Good Samaritan: Don"t be so caught up in the regulations that you forget about the big things, like compa.s.sion and respect for life. The righteous idiot is what the Christian Bible calls a Pharisee--one of the sanctimonious legalistic scholars who criticize Christ"s followers for picking grain on the Sabbath.
As I mentioned in the introduction, one of the reasons that I embarked on this experiment was to take legalism to its logical extreme and show that it leads to righteous idiocy. What better way to demonstrate the absurdity of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism? If you actually follow all the rules, you"ll spend your days acting like a crazy person.
I still believe that. And I still plan on making a complete fool of myself to get this point across. But as with everything involving religion, my project has become much more complicated. The spiritual journey now takes up far more of my time.
My friend Roger was right. It"s not like studying Sumo wrestling in j.a.pan. It"s more like wrestling itself. This opponent of mine is sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel, sometimes ancient, sometimes crazily relevant. I can"t get a handle on it.
Month Four: December
For everything there is a season . . .
--ECCLESIASTES 3:1.
Day 93. December has arrived, and everyone is gearing up for the big Judeo-Christian holidays. New York is packed. I tried to walk through Rockefeller Center the other day, and I got flashbacks to the mosh pit at the Hasidic rave.
I feel oddly out of sync. This is because the Bible itself has surprisingly little to say about the December holidays. The New Testament talks about the birth of Jesus, of course. But there"s no description of how to celebrate that birth--no tree, no services, no carols, no eggnog, no Frank Capra films. Which means that some of the more literalist Christian denominations--including the Jehovah"s Witnesses and the Worldwide Church of G.o.d--don"t celebrate Christmas at all.
Hanukkah doesn"t make it into the Bible either. The story of Hanukkah--the revolt of the Jewish rebels the Maccabees against their Greek oppressor Antiochus--appears (though only in a section of the Bible called the Apocrypha, which in Judaism is considered noncanonical). But there"s nothing in the Scriptures about the lighting of eight candles or eating oil-soaked latkes.
I"ll be sitting out this holiday season. Well, as much as I can. I still have to buy some gifts for Julie. I can"t get away with skipping that, and the Bible is actually pro-gift-giving ("It is more blessed to give than to receive," Acts 20:35). Fortunately, buying gifts won"t take too much time; Julie is so absurdly organized, she always hands me a stack of catalogs with the gifts she wants circled in red Magic Marker and marked with Post-it notes. It"s a great thing. As is the conviction with which she says the inevitable "Oh my G.o.d! How did you know?"
Let your garments be always white.
--ECCLESIASTES 9:8.
Day 95. I looked in the mirror today and decided it"s official: I"ve become someone I"d cross the street to avoid. To complement my beard and ta.s.sels, I"ve begun wearing all white, as prescribed by King Solomon in Ecclesiastes: "Let your garments be always white." White pants, white T-shirts, a white sweater, and a white zip-up jacket from the Gap, all without mixed fibers, naturally.
Which means that when I say good-bye to Julie in the morning, I get one of two responses. Either 1) A Sat.u.r.day Night Fever Sat.u.r.day Night Fever hand twirl and accompanying arm thrust hand twirl and accompanying arm thrust or 2) A Fonzie-like "Aaaaayyyyyy!"
The John Travolta reference I understand, but the Fonzie one stumped me.
"In the first season, Fonzie wore white because black leather was considered too menacing," Julie explained. (This is a woman who still has her childhood collection of TV Guides. TV Guides.) Personally, I prefer to think of myself in a more highbrow mold--a biblical version of Tom Wolfe. Or perhaps a modern Emily d.i.c.kinson, who became a recluse in the 1870s and refused to wear anything but white.
Regardless, it"s a bizarre sensation walking around the Upper West Side in white garments--or "tusk" garments, as the Gap calls them. As with many New Yorkers, my regular wardrobe is made up mostly of bleak colors: blacks, browns, a daring splash of navy blue. It seems to suit the city"s soot and cynicism. Dark clothes for a dark city.
I rarely see New Yorkers wearing all white unless they"re behind a bakery counter. So I"m getting even more wary glances than ever on the subway. I like to play a game: I swivel my head around quickly and see how many gawkers I can catch. Usually at least two.
But the thing is, I"m enjoying it. My white wardrobe makes me feel lighter, more spiritual. Happier. It"s further proof of a major theme of this year: The outer affects the inner. Behavior shapes your psyche as much as the other way around. Clothes make the man. As I walk down Columbus Avenue on this brisk day, with the wind flattening my white pants and jacket against me, I think to myself, "Life can"t be too terrible if I"m dressed like I"m about to play the semifinals at Wimbledon or attend P. Diddy"s birthday party, right?"
The "white garment" line from Ecclesiastes is usually interpreted metaphorically--as a call to remain pure and joyous. But it"s not beyonda-doubt metaphorical. Maybe it means what it says: Dress in white. An ancient Israelite sect called the Essenes dressed in white, as do some kabbalists. I should have been wearing all white from day one, but it was one of those rules I felt I had to build up to. Now that I"m doing it, I don"t want to stop.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. --EXO D U S 20:8 --EXO D U S 20:8 Day 97. It"s a Tuesday afternoon in December, but I feel like I"ve just experienced my first real Sabbath.
Let me explain: The doork.n.o.bs 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 doork.n.o.b succ.u.mbed to gravity.
Usually, I screw the k.n.o.b 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 doork.n.o.b. 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 is away at a meeting, and Jasper is out with his babysitter. I"ve seen Ocean"s Eleven, Ocean"s Eleven, so I know to look for the grill in the ceiling that I can 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. so I know to look for the grill in the ceiling that I can 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, and end up on the front page of the New York Post 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. Emails 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 m.u.f.fled 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 an 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 enow.
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 tilted at a rakishly diagonal angle. I spend a half hour tidying the medicine cabinet. I notice that the ingredients in Chlor-Trimeton 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 OK 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 thirty-two square feet of fake marble and an angled 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 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 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 is more mature. After a few seconds, she just opened the door. I am free. I can return my emails, make my calls. It"s kind of a shame.
All my sleep has fled because of the bitterness of my soul. --ISAIAH 38:15 --ISAIAH 38:15 Day 101. Another sleepless night. I lay in bed, adjusting and readjusting my pillow, unable to stop obsessing about this horrible news segment I caught on TV. It said that the recidivism rate for meth addicts is 80 percent. This freaks me out. If Jasper someday tries a little meth--"What"s the harm?" he"ll say to himself, "my parents were always in favor of experimentation"--he"ll get addicted forever and end up hollow eyed and slack jawed in a county jail. Maybe it"s true. This whole loosey-goosey parenting style is too dangerous.
A few months ago, right before my biblical year began, Julie and I went to Baltimore to attend the wedding of Sara, the daughter of my Orthodox aunt Kate, and I sat next to one of Kate"s friends. She had a widebrimmed white hat that wouldn"t be out of place at Prince William"s wedding, a peculiar counterpoint to the black-hatted Hasidim who were there.
She told me that her background was completely secular. But when she had kids, she and her husband made a deliberate decision to become religious.
"I didn"t trust American culture."
"No?" I asked.
"Well, what does American culture teach?"
I wasn"t sure what to say. "I think there are lots of different American cultures."
This was the wrong answer.
"If you turn on the TV, you see "buy, buy, buy, s.e.x and violence, buy, buy, buy." We decided to live by a different code."
They explored several religions, including Hinduism, but ended up diving into Orthodox Judaism, since they were born Jewish.
They didn"t become ultrareligious because of a charismatic leader or the truth of the Bible--they did it for the structure. And now their kids have grown up into responsible young adults. I met one of them. A nice computer geek.
It"s something I should consider. More structure for Jasper. In my pop culture-tainted mind, I keep coming back to this conundrum: Would I rather have Bart Simpson or one of the Flanders kids? A couple of years ago, I would have chosen the loveably s.p.u.n.ky Bart. No question. But nowadays, now that I have my own three-dimensional son, I"m leaning toward the Flanders progeny. Yes, they may be a little creepy, they may sing loud songs about Noah"s ark, but at least you know they won"t spend their free time burning down the cafeteria or skateboarding off a canyon. I"d sacrifice some individuality for the knowledge that my son will outlive me.
"Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes."
--GENESIS 18:27.
Day 103. I"m trying to pray for a half hour a day in three ten-minute intervals, usually in the corner of Julie"s office, a couple of feet from the basket full of Real Simple Real Simple magazines. A half hour"s no record, I know. But at least I"m not glancing at the clock every minute as I did in the beginning. magazines. A half hour"s no record, I know. But at least I"m not glancing at the clock every minute as I did in the beginning.
And once in a while, I actually find myself looking forward to those ten-minute sessions, especially at night. It"s a decompression. When I was a kid, I spent several minutes each night before bed picturing waterskiers slaloming over choppy waves. I don"t know how I came up with the ritual. It"s not like I was a big fan of water skiing--I had tried it at camp and ended up with a gut full of lake water. But I found visualizing it relaxing. Maybe prayer will serve the same purpose. I get to close the door, close my eyes, and sink into a meditative state, or as close to one as my brain will allow me.
Plus, I"ve discovered another category of prayer that I like: praying on behalf of others, for the sick, needy, depressed--anyone who"s been kicked around by fate. Intercessory prayer, as it"s called.
I"ve read a bunch of articles about intercessory prayer recently-- mostly about how it"s sprouted up all over the internet. You can place prayer requests on websites like ePrayer.com and CyberSaint. (Recent examples include "I am expecting my first child. Please pray for a speedy delivery," and "Please pray for me to complete my thesis work, it is delayed by eight months.") Intercessory prayer can be found sprinkled throughout the Bible-- with everyone from Moses to Paul pleading with G.o.d for the sake of others. Abraham is the first to try it, and he"s far from successful. It"s a curious scene. G.o.d announces to Abraham that he"s considering laying waste to the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Abraham asks him: "Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?"
And the Lord said, "If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake."
Abraham answered, "Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Wilt thou destroy the whole city for lack of five?"
And He said, "I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there."
It continues. Abraham is able to haggle the Lord down to ten people--if there are ten good people in Sodom, G.o.d agrees not to smite it.
In the end, though, as you know, Sodom didn"t meet the quota.
At first I found the whole pa.s.sage comical. I mean, here"s Abraham sounding like a salesman at a bazaar trying to get rid of his last decorative vase. But on reflection, what"s wrong with what he did? It"s actually a n.o.ble, beautiful--if ultimately doomed--attempt to save the lives of his fellow humans.
I"m not finished with my year, so I"m withholding judgment, but my rational side says that intercessory prayer today is no more effective than Abraham"s effort. I still can"t wrap my brain around the notion that G.o.d would change His mind because we ask Him to.
And yet I still love these prayers. To me they"re moral weight training. Every night I pray for others for ten minutes--a friend about to undergo a cornea operation, my great-aunt whose sweet husband just died in their swimming pool, the guy I met in a Bible study cla.s.s whose head was dented in a subway accident. It"s ten minutes where it"s impossible to be self-centered. Ten minutes where I can"t think about my career, or my Amazon.com ranking, or that a blog in San Francisco made snarky comments about my latest Esquire Esquire article. article.
The Bible says not to boast, so I"m not going to say that I"ve turned into Albert Schweitzer or Angelina Jolie. But I do feel myself becoming a slightly more compa.s.sionate person.
The odd thing, though, is that to be fully compa.s.sionate, I might not want to tell these people I"m praying for them. I recently read about a new study of 1,802 coronary artery bypa.s.s patients. The patients who knew they were being prayed for actually had more more complications than those who didn"t. Perhaps they thought, "Well, if I"m sick enough that I need people to pray for me, I must really be in bad shape." In case that"s true, I"ll pray secretly and hope they don"t read this chapter. complications than those who didn"t. Perhaps they thought, "Well, if I"m sick enough that I need people to pray for me, I must really be in bad shape." In case that"s true, I"ll pray secretly and hope they don"t read this chapter.
. . . The treacherous are taken captive by their l.u.s.t. --PROVERBS 11:6 --PROVERBS 11:6 Day 105. So, l.u.s.t. This week, my job at Esquire Esquire has forced the issue. Before I explain, let me confess that l.u.s.t has been one of my biggest has forced the issue. Before I explain, let me confess that l.u.s.t has been one of my biggest failings so far this year. Ever since that first day when I spotted that gym ad of two gorgeous sweaty people clutching each other after what was apparently a very vigorous workout, I"ve been trying to smother my libido.
I try not to think about s.e.x. I try not to talk about s.e.x. I try not to glance at women on the street. The problem is, my heart"s not in it.
Thanks to my thirty-eight years of staunchly secular life, I"m having a hard time adjusting to the worldview that s.e.xuality is sinful. Well, some s.e.xuality is sinful, as anyone with a DSL line can tell you. But I"m having trouble getting worked up over a moderate amount of s.e.xuality in culture.
I"m guessing that this has a lot to do with my previous wrestling matches with s.e.x. In high school and college, I experienced some startling dry spells. To justify my involuntary abstinence, I told myself that I was above such cra.s.s human motivations as s.e.x. I had better things to do than think about women. And what is s.e.x, anyway? Just some skin contact necessary for DNA mixing during procreation. I didn"t need it. I tried to turn myself into a neo-Puritan. I was pure intellect, with my body just a sh.e.l.l to transport that brain from place to place. It didn"t work. My attempt to stifle my s.e.x drive didn"t make me a more righteous person--I just got more frustrated and unhappy and preoccupied with s.e.x. So for years, I"ve thought that as long as I remain faithful to Julie and don"t let my libido run rampant, what"s the harm in a little s.e.xuality in culture? A racy joke, an unacted-upon fantasy, a movie with partial nudity? It never bothered me much.
But now everyone expects me--or more precisely, Jacob, my biblical alter ego--to embrace extreme modesty and total restraint. No carnal thoughts, no carnal words. It"s a reasonable expectation, I suppose.
Modesty has been a huge part of the Judeo-Christian tradition for a long time. Orthodox Jews follow rigid modesty rules: women cover their hair and cannot wear a dress revealing their collarbone. Some conservative Christians also conceal flesh and shun R-rated movies.
So I"ve been trying. The difficulty is, the level of s.e.xual imagery in modern life is astounding. I knew intuitively this was true, but when you tune into it, you just can"t believe it. I click on the Yahoo! finance page, and there"s this blond model in a low-cut dress looking at a computer screen and nibbling alluringly on the temple of her gla.s.ses, apparently very aroused by the latest S&P 500 report. Even the suburban-mom character on Dora the Explorer Dora the Explorer has clothes that are disturbingly form has clothes that are disturbingly form fitting. Or maybe that"s just me.
A few weeks ago, I heard that the Rev. Billy Graham, before he arrives at a hotel, has his room swept for potentially tempting images. I decided to sweep my own apartment. I stashed away all magazines that we had lying around, like the one with Jessica Alba in a blue skintight suit.
Next I took out a roll of masking tape and got to work censoring the images around the apartment. Anything that has the potential to stir my libido got covered with a piece of tape.