The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

For an hour, without pausing, he pontificates to this pretty blonde he's trying to pick up. She hears the following (as does everyone else):

"My one-man show Why Try is a dissertation on suicide," he announces. "It's very funny. I have a very funny mind. Death is funny. I haven't been to a funeral that I haven't laughed at."

She nods politely.

"My teacher said to me, 'You are a great actor.' And I said, 'I don't know what that means.' And I don't. All I know is the process."

Oh, man, I wanted so much to lean over to Julie and mock this bloviating putz with his greased-back hair and his pompous Buddy Holly glasses.

He continues:

"Whhhhhy do I admire George Clooney? I'll tell you. He wants to do something for society at large--and beyond."

I want to point out to Julie that he overpronounces his t's and wh's.

A couple of minutes later, apropos of nothing, he says:

"I've always wanted to write a comic strip called Grizelda of Drunkopolis."

When it becomes clear--even to him--that this woman is not going to climb into bed with him, he tries to engage the other passengers. Including me. A mutual acquaintance had mentioned that I write for a trivia magazine called Mental Floss. This is his way in. He shouts:

"Mental Floss Man over there! Mental Floss!! Tell us some trivia!"

His tone makes it clear that my job is not on the artistic level of his one-man show about suicide. I demur. After we get off the van, I hold back for three minutes. Julie and I just walk silently to our apartment. But there's something to the hydraulic metaphor in human behavior: the steam keeps building up and up in my brain. I have to let it out.

"Can you believe that idiot?" I say finally, as we wait at an intersection. "'Society at large--and beyond?' What is beyond society at large? Society at large is beyond."

Julie just nods her head. She knows.

Maybe taming my tongue will be good for me in the end. But it's pretty hard when you've got a world filled with idiots from Drunkopolis. It's like asking me not to breathe or blink. All I can say is, I'll keep trying.

And they fell on their faces . . .

--NUMBERS 16:45

Day 72. I've bought a lot of books this year, but this new Amazon delivery is a big one: the autobiography of my ex-uncle Gil. When I open the box, the first thing that strikes me is this: Gil is not opposed to graven images. The cover features no fewer than eleven photos of Gil. Gil in front of his hippie bus; Gil with his eyes shut, smelling flowers; Gil perched regally on a red armchair.

The book is called Coming Back to Earth: The Central Park Guru Becomes an Old City Jew and was published in 2004 by a small Jewish press. It was banned by some rabbis in Israel because, among other things, it contains four-letter words. I start to read, and it doesn't disappoint. His life is crazier than I anticipated, even if you make allowances for the occasional James Frey-like fabrication.

Gil grew up in a secular Jewish family in upstate New York. He became a financial consultant in Phoenix--and a successful one, by his account. But he felt something missing. So he dropped out and reinvented himself as a hippie.

Some of his adventures are typically hippie; the things you might see in an early Dennis Hopper film: He dropped acid and passed out for three days. He ate nothing but watermelon for two weeks straight in an attempt to cleanse himself. He got high in an opium den in Pakistan. He was arrested for skinny-dipping in Virginia. His wardrobe consisted of a tablecloth.

But other escapades are outlandish even by hippie standards. Gil trekked to an ashram in northern India where he lived in a squalid yard with five thousand other devotees. The ashram's guru--a man with a huge Afro and a crimson-colored robe--would emerge from his house every day but never deign to speak to Gil. Gil waited for weeks.

Finally, one day, the guru's pet elephant, Gita, went on a stampede in the ashram yard. Panic everywhere. Gil stood up, "threw my hand in the air toward the raging elephant and screamed, 'Stop!' " The elephant stopped. From then on, Gil had a place in the guru's inner circle. This allowed him to meet John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who were disenchanted with their own guru--the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi--because, writes Gil, "he couldn't keep his hands off Mia Farrow's butt."

Gil came back to New York and opted to go into the guru business himself. He decided that God wanted him to start his sect on a bench on the corner of 86th Street and Central Park West. He sat there, gazing at the tip of his nose for eight months, amassing--by his account--dozens of followers who sat at his feet, soaking up his vibes: seekers, stockbrokers, poets, and movie stars (Sally Kirkland!).

Did I mention that he wasn't speaking at the time? Gil had given up vocal communication, remaining silent for three years. He dispensed wisdom (for example, "smoke the best bag first") to his followers through a sign language of his own invention.

Eventually Gil moved his "family" to Ithaca, New York. He lived in a yurt by a pond, meditating for--he says--twenty-three hours a day. All of his needs were attended to by his worshipful followers, who, by the way, had been given brilliantly sixtiesish names like Rainbow, Bliss, and Banana Tree. And I do mean worshipful. They literally fell on their faces in front of him.

Gil's Hindu phase came to an abrupt end when he read a pamphlet someone left in his bathhouse. It was about Christianity. Gil became a born-again Christian leader who, among other things, battled demons and healed a homeless man.

That phase, in turn, came to an equally abrupt end when Gil started to read the Hebrew Bible more closely. It was during this time that Gil followed the Bible literally: When he made tassels of yarn and attached them to every corner he could find on his clothes, and when he tied a wad of cash around his hand.

He eventually switched to more traditional Jewish practices. And nowadays, he spends his days in Jerusalem binding tefillin on tourists at the Western Wall and holding Shabbat dinner for young seekers. But I get the feeling that Gil is a very unorthodox Orthodox Jew. One of his theological precepts is that everything is God, sort of a Semitic pantheism. Other Hasidim say that God is everywhere--but Gil takes it to the extreme.

He writes that he was once sent to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as a megalomaniac. Gil writes: "I had to look it up in a dictionary. It said, 'someone who believes they are God.' I had to agree with that. I not only thought I was God, I thought (and still think) all is God."

Gil's life inspired another obscure book that I figured I should read as well. Called Yea God, this 1980 biography painted a much darker picture of Guru Gil. If Gil's was the Disney version, this was the Grimm's.

Here we meet a Gil who was sexist (men in his cult got cushy yurts, women had to suffice with tepees) and controlling (he went so far as to instruct his followers how to go to the bathroom properly). Worse, according to this book, Gil sometimes smacked around members of the family. And here's the crazy part: They allegedly liked it. "Thank you for loving this one enough to beat him," it quotes one follower saying, in the odd third-person language of the family. (Gil says he was "out of his mind" during this part of his life, so he can't remember everything, but that the allegations about his violence are overblown.)

There's a scene about the father and mother of one of Gil's cult members. They feel like they no longer know their daughter--who has started to refer to them as her "body family." It's a heartbreaking story. And it makes me understand what my grandparents must have gone through when Kate became Gil's number-one follower.

It's exactly what I was always most afraid of with religion. To embrace religion, you have to surrender some control. But what if it's a slippery slope, and you lose all control, slide right past the Judeo-Christian mainstream, and end up in a yurt kneeling in front of a guy wearing a tablecloth who has renamed you Lotus Petal?

It's why I don't know what to do with Jasper. If I give him some religion, then he might become obsessed and go Guru Gil on me. Then again, if I give him no religion, he could descend into moral anarchy. They're both so risky. I feel like I can't win.

You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

--EXO D U S 20:4

Day 75. I've added another commandment to my Most Violated List: no making images. It was a surprise entry. Until I focused on it, I didn't realize the pervasiveness of images or how often I made them.

The loose interpretation of the Second Commandment--which starts out "You shall not make for yourself a graven image"--is that it prohibits idolatry. God is telling us not to bow down to golden calves or carved pillars.

But the more severe interpretation, which still echoes through JudeoChristian tradition today, is that we should allow no images whatsoever. No drawing or sculpture or photography. No painting, unless you're Rothko or Mondrian. This is because the latter part of the commandment forbids us from making the "likeness of anything in the sky, or earth, or in the water." Which pretty much covers it.

The strictest adherents in America right now are probably the aforementioned Amish. Modern-day conservative Islam is also famous for its avoidance of images. It's the reason why the Taliban shut down all movie theaters and riots erupted after that Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad.

Since I'm following the Bible literally, I figure I should take a rigorous approach, somewhere between the Amish and the Taliban. Which is enormously difficult.

I can't absentmindedly doodle. I can't use smiley face emoticons, which I never used anyway, but it was nice knowing I had the option. I can't turn on the TV (though I decide that it's OK to watch TV if it's already on, because that cannot be construed as "making an image"). I used to entertain Jasper by doing Google image searches of his favorite animals; no more. This is probably good, because typing in something like kitty inevitably turns up a woman in a skimpy cat outfit licking her hand.

I've tried to stop taking photos. Well, as much as possible, anyway. When I balked at snapping a picture of my wife and her mom at her mom's birthday, Julie said, "Can we have a sidebar conference, please?" The result of that tense negotiation: I'll take this photo, but after that, I'm done.

Granted, my starvation diet from images can be a headache. This morning Jasper dumped his Play-Doh on the table. And, as usual, he instructed me what to make. He's now moved beyond grunts to a vocabulary of twenty-odd words.

"Ball!"

"How about a circle?" I respond.

I figure Platonic shapes are OK. I make a circle.

"Car!"

"You want to see a square?" I make a square.

"Nemo," says Jasper. (Nemo is Jasper's word for any type of fish; as

a good protoconsumer, he speaks in brand names.)

"Here you go," I say, making an oval. I'm starting to run out of

shapes.

Jasper seems disappointed by my Play-Doh geometry. I feel ridiculous for refusing to make him a fish, but I also know that I have to do

this experiment full bore, or else I'll risk missing out on key spiritual discoveries. No cutting corners.

At least I have plenty of historical precedents. The Second Commandment played a huge part in the Protestant Reformation. Several

Protestant leaders--including John Calvin--urged the removal and/or

smashing of paintings and statues from churches. Riots erupted in Switzerland and Scotland, among other places. Aside from provoking idolatry, images were thought to be a sign of human vanity. People were

trying to compete with the God of creation.

Jews have also obeyed this commandment on and off. Orthodox

Jews still won't make a sculpture of a human. Some Jews of fourteenthcentury Germany wouldn't draw people, though they did find my favorite loophole: They illustrated their texts with bird-headed humans. You

see, the commandment forbids the likeness of anything in heaven or

earth--and, technically, bird-headed humans don't exist in heaven or

earth. Ingenious, no?

My vacation from iconography has been surprising, even enlightening. Despite the inconvenience, I do like image avoidance. First, it suits my job. Images are taking over, and writers are a dying

breed. The Norman Mailers of today are reduced to writing pun-filled

captions for paparazzi photos. Blogs--which were threatening enough

to professional writers--are being replaced by video blogs. We writers

need to embrace the Second Commandment as our rallying cry for the

importance of words. In a literally biblical world, all publications would

look like the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Or the way it used to

look, anyway.

Second, I think there's something to the idea that the divine dwells

more easily in text than in images. Text allows for more abstract thought,

more of a separation between you and the physical world, more room

for you and God to meet in the middle. I find it hard enough to conceive

of an infinite being. Imagine if those original scrolls came in the form of

a graphic novel with pictures of the Lord? I'd never come close to communing with the divine.

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.

Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty.

--PROVERBS 20:13

Day 77. The other day, my grandfather asked me, "Do you sleep with the beard under the covers or over the covers?" Now that I'm aware of it, I can't stop thinking about it. I switch positions every few minutes.

It's just one of the reasons I'm having trouble sleeping. The problem is, I'm downloading so much spiritual information during the days that I spend my nights awake in bed trying to process it. (Incidentally, the author of Proverbs would be fine with my lack of sleep; he considers sleep a sign of laziness that will lead to poverty.)

As I lie in bed tonight, I think about Answers in Genesis, which just sent me another colorful brochure. Maybe I let myself off the creationism hook too easily. As unlikely as the six-day scenario may be, shouldn't I at least give it the benefit of doubt?

So I do an experiment. I try to put myself into the mind of my biblical alter ego Jacob. I convince myself that the earth was formed a handful of generations ago. I can't 100 percent believe, but for a few minutes, I almost believe it.

And it is fascinating. The first thing I notice is that I feel more connected. If everyone on earth is descended from two identifiable people-- Adam and Eve--then the "family of man" isn't just pabulum. It's true. The guy who sells me bananas at the deli on 81st Street--he's my cousin.

But even more powerful is this feeling: My life is more significant. If the earth is ten billion years old, I'm barely a drop of water in the ocean that is the universe. But if the earth is six thousand years old, then I've been alive for a decent portion of the world's existence. I'm no bit player. I've got a speaking part in the movie of life.

My thought experiment crystallized a key tension I've noticed in the Bible. On the one hand, the Bible teaches extreme humility. Humans are sinful, barely worthy of praying to God.

On the other hand, there's a certain--I don't know if arrogance is quite the right word. Maybe pride. Humans are the pinnacle of biblical creation, the ones God saved until last on the sixth day, beings that are vastly superior to the beasts and nature. We are made in God's image. (As the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza said, if triangles could think, their God would be eminently triangular.)

I believe that's a key motivation to creationism: the need to feel less inconsequential. I remember Mark Looy--the publicist for the Creation Museum--saying, "Evolution says that we are the product of random processes. That we evolved via pond scum. When we say that, we're not applying much value to humanity. If we say we're a product of accidents and random processes, how much purpose and hope does that give to our youth?"

Since I'll never convert to creationism, I have to find some dignity and self-esteem and sacredness even with our mucky origins.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

--PROVERBS 22:6

Day 78. I've started to wear sunglasses more often. I can't find anything in the Bible prohibiting them, and they make my beard--which is now approaching my Adam's apple--look slightly hipper. More indie record producer, less Crown Heights. Today I've taken my shades on a trip to the playground with my wife and son. Julie's reading her People magazine on the bench, and I'm scampering around after Jasper.

He wants to go on the swing.

"OK, just give me a second," I say.

I take a bottle of Purell antibacterial lotion from the stroller bag.

These playgrounds, they're like a germ free-for-all. I wipe the chain on the left side of the swing, then start in on the right side. Jasper is whining that he wants to get on already.

"Almost ready," I say.

Julie looks up from her magazine to see the battle in progress. "A. J.," she says. "Helmet."

Helmet is Julie's code word to me that I'm being a crazy overprotective father. We've had so many fights about this, she thought it'd be easier to just sum up her position with a single word: helmet. She chose helmet because, at one point, without irony, I checked out the prices of baby helmets on the internet.

It's just that these kids are so fragile, you know? They've only got that mushy little skull separating their brains from the sidewalk. They have only two years of an immune system built up.

Last week Julie and I got into an argument because I said I didn't want him going to something called the International Preschool. This is a preschool where a lot of UN workers send their kids.

I said I don't want him to become too interested in foreign countries because then he might live in one when he grows up.

"You're kidding, right?"

"No, I want him to live in the same town I do."

"That's why you don't want him to go there?"

"Yes."

"That's demented."

She told me that I have to back off. Otherwise I'll be cutting his hot dog into tiny pieces when he's nineteen and chaperoning him to the prom. That's when she came up with helmet.

Maybe she's right. Maybe I should treat Jasper more like God treats humans in the Bible. He gave us free will. He relinquished some control because He wanted us to be able to make our own mistakes and have our own victories.

Maybe I should. But I can't. I can't expose him to an unsanitary swing with its millions of microorganisms. So I give the right-hand chain another squirt of Purell. Julie shakes her head.

It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting . . .

--ECCLESIASTES 7:2

Day 80. The extended family has gathered at my grandfather's apartment in midtown for a late lunch. It's to honor my grandmother, who died two years ago. It's our own secular ritual--we get together once a year to reminisce. My grandmother was a remarkable woman--smart, funny, elegant, organized beyond belief (each of her six children was assigned a different color, and got towels only in that color, left notes in that color, and so on).

And man, was she secular. For her, family was the alpha and omega, so she found the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac on a mountaintop particularly inexplicable.

"How could a father even think about killing his son?" she once told me when I was a kid. "What a horrible story."

After her daughter's switch to Orthodoxy, my grandmother--though she never stopped loving Kate--went from being secular to fiercely antireligious. I remember walking down 57th Street with her. We passed a Hasidic man draped in his black hat and black coat. I looked at my grandmother, who was staring at the man, almost scowling--and then she darted her tongue out. Quick as a snake, just poked it out.

"What was that?" I asked.

"I always stick my tongue out at people like that," she said.

"Do you think he saw?"

"He saw," she said. "He knows."

She was torn between her usual polite, elegant self and her real ha- tred for what she saw as religious fundamentalism. I often wonder what she would have thought of my experiment.

Everyone is at the lunch, including both Kate and my vegan-feminist aunt Marti from Berkeley. Marti gives me some stern pointers on politically incorrect, violence-laden religious words to avoid.

"You shouldn't use the word sacred, because it comes from the same root word as sacrifice. As in animal sacrifice."

"OK."

"And bless comes from the Old English word bletsian, which means 'consecrate with blood.' So don't use that."

"What about Bible?"

"I'm not sure about that one."

"It comes from byblos, the Greek word for papyrus. Made from the corpses of once-living plants."

"Yes, maybe avoid that too," she says.

Kate also gives me suggestions on language. Right before lunch, Jasper wants to show me a fascinating trick in which he jumps from the rug to the wooden floor, so he tugs on my pants and says, "A. J.! A. J.!"

"Yes, I'm watching."

"He calls you A. J.?" asks Kate.

"Yeah. We're on a first-name basis."

I've tried to convert Jasper to the more traditional "Dad" or "Daddy," but he insists on A. J. So I've gotten used to it.

"Children aren't supposed to use their parents' first names," says Kate. "It's disrespectful."

Kate's probably right; in biblical times, there was no such thing as an informal I'm-friends-with-my-kid father. Without me knowing it, Jasper was violating the "honor your parents" commandment.

A few minutes later, when we all sit down to lunch, my grandfather asks me, "What's the strangest rule you have to follow?"

I mentally scan my list of Five Most Perplexing Rules. I choose one at random. "Probably the one about how if you're in a fistfight, and the wife of your opponent grabs your private parts, you must cut off her hand."

"That," he says, "is very strange indeed."

And it is. But that's exactly what the Bible says in Deuteronomy 25:11-12:

When men fight with one another, and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him, and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand; your eye shall have no pity.

So far (knock on wood) I've avoided getting in a brawl with a man whose wife looks like she has a firm grip. So I guess I'm obeying the commandment by default and can congratulate myself on that.

But, as with the mixed fibers, it baffles me. Why the specificity? Why does the Bible ban this particular below-the-belt maneuver and not, say, a kidney punch or a kick between the thighs? Julie suggests it's because the writer of Deuteronomy had this precise unpleasant scenario happen to him and so decided to forbid it for all eternity.

Unfortunately, Kate is within earshot when I tell my grandfather about the private parts rule. Damn. I thought she had been in the kitchen. I didn't want her hearing me talk about the crazy ones without balancing it with some good ones.

And sure enough, she looks stricken. Like she just discovered that her son smokes two packs a day. She had studied the Bible for years but had never learned about the husband-grabbing part. It's just not one that gets a lot of play at synagogue.

The next day, I get three voice mails. All from Kate. "Is part of your biblical life that you're not allowed to answer the phone?" she says.

I call her back.

"I talked to my rabbi," Kate says. "And, yes, it is in the Torah." But . . . it's supposed to represent something broader: Do not embarrass others. The wife here is embarrassing her husband by assuming he needs help. And the wife is embarrassing the husband's opponent by, well, grabbing his privates. Plus, adds Kate, you didn't actually chop off the wife's hand. That's metaphorical. The woman was required only to pay a fine.

OK. It does seem more rational if interpreted that way. But my question is: Why didn't the Bible just say that? Why not just say "Don't embarrass others"? Why the mysterious code?

I've asked all of the Jewish members of my spiritual board this question. The best answer I've gotten is this, from a rabbi named Noah Weinberg, a founder of Aish HaTorah, the outreach group: Life is a jigsaw puzzle, he told me. The joy and challenge of life--and the Bible--is figuring things out. "If a jigsaw puzzle came numbered, you'd return it to the store." Same with life.

It's a good answer, but only partly satisfying. I have to keep digging.

Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field.

--DEUTERONOMY 28:16

Day 82. Tonight I break the Eighth Commandment--no stealing--and I pay the price.

It happens when I try to research different types of biblical incense on the internet. Problem is our wireless connection is on the fritz. So I go in search of a signal. I take my laptop to the gray-walled emergency stairwell and descend to the fourth floor. I figure maybe I can glom onto a neighbor's network. I try one called Sonicboy. No dice. Password required. I go down another flight. Zildo y Zelda? Nope. Also requires a password. But down another flight, I find a network with the beautifully generic name Wireless. An excellent sign. If they can't be bothered to come up with a name, maybe they don't know about this newfangled thing called passwords. Yes, I get a signal. But it's not coming in strong enough, so I climb down another two stairs. At which point I trip and slam my knee into the railing and bash my laptop against the wall.

So I deserved it. The Bible says thou shalt not steal; I stole my neighbor's wireless signal. And I'm now limping around the house with a bum knee.

Was this God's punishment? I don't know. I don't honestly think so. Would my ancient Israelite ancestors have thought so (assuming I explained wireless internet etiquette to them)? Maybe. As with everything biblical, there's no simple answer about the consequences of sin. You can find several major themes.

The first is that God will punish you, and He will punish you in this life. This motif is best seen in Deuteronomy 28, which contains the three most terrifying pages in the history of publishing. Here you read every horrible disease and weather pattern that will befall you if you don't live by the Bible.

The Lord will "smite you with consumption, and with fever, inflammation, and fiery heat, and with drought, and with blasting and with mildew."

And that's just a little warm-up. It continues:

"And the heavens over your head shall be brass, and the earth under you shall be iron. And the Lord will make the rain of your land powder and dust."

It's actually oddly beautiful. Take away the fact that the words condemn you to a life of aching, thirsty, itchy torment, and it's poetic, breathtaking.

"You shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness . . ."

"You shall betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her . . ."

It goes on to say that you shall be reduced to eating your own children and trying--unsuccessfully--to sell yourself as a slave. That's right. You aren't good enough for slavery. There is also a section on the good things that will happen if you follow the law. But it's only one-quarter the length of the curses. It's the curses that stay with you.

In some hyperreligious circles, this type of thinking persists. Jerry Falwell, for instance, argued that 9/11 was God's punishment for America's depravity.

I find myself slipping into the bad-people-get-what's-coming-tothem mind-set now and again. But only for a second. The world doesn't seem to work that way. Just look at the evil people in America. They don't have boils on their legs, and they're not eating their children. Many are living in penthouses, and some have their own reality shows.

Thankfully, the Bible is a big book, an infinitely complex book, and there are many alternatives. One recurring theme--found mostly in the New Testament--says that you will be rewarded in heaven. Another strain--found in books like Ecclesiastes and Job--takes a modern, almost agnostic, view.

Ecclesiastes is probably my favorite book of the Bible. I first read about it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and I have loved it ever since. Called Qohelet in Hebrew, the book is a collection of wisdom and reminiscences from a man who identifies himself as King Solomon. If you believe modern biblical scholars, the author was probably not Solomon but instead a now-anonymous poet from the third century BCE. Whoever he was, the writing is awe inspiring.

Every time I read it, I feel myself doing a little silent call-and-response with the text. "Yes." "That's right." I feel the thrill of recognizing thoughts that I have had myself, but that I've never been able to capture in such beautiful language. And I feel the oddity of finding myself on the same wavelength as a man who lived two thousand years ago. It's the closest I've come to proselytizing--telling friends they have to read Ecclesiastes.

In any case, the author of Ecclesiastes says: "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all."

Ecclesiastes says that life is uncertain. "Vapor of vapors . . . all is vapors." (This is a more accurate translation of the phrase usually rendered: "vanity of vanities . . . all is vanity.") We can never hope to plumb the mystery of God's mind. Bad things happen to good people. Idiots and geniuses, saints and sinners--we all die. The best we can do is try to appreciate the great things that God has given us--food, drink, the pleasure of honest work. We should follow the commandments, but we should do so with no guarantee that they will pay off in this life.

This is so wise. Be good for goodness' sake, as someone once said. It's a pragmatic worldview. The thing is, it's not a solid worldview. It's vapor, all vapor. If I knew for sure that I'd be punished for sinning, then I'd have an undeniable reason to follow God's word. But I doubt I'll ever believe that for certain. So what to do? Part of me wants something more tangible than the vapor. Can I find it by the end of the year? Or is that, as Ecclesiastes says, chasing the wind?

He who despises his neighbor is a sinner . . . --PROVERBS 14:21

Day 84. I've been trying to love my neighbor, but in New York, this is particularly difficult. It's an aloof city. I don't even know my neighbor's names, much less love them. I know them only as woman-whose-cooking-smells-nasty and guy-who-getsBarron's-delivered-each-week, and so forth.

Well, except for Nancy in 5I. We met because our son and her beagle are about the same age, have pretty much the same vocabulary, and share similar interests, such as running around the hall.

Nancy is a former hippie who was once friends with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. In fact, she looks like what Janis Joplin would have looked like if Janis Joplin had lived another thirty-five years. In the sixties, Nancy took a lot of drugs, had a couple of disastrous relationships with men, did some waitressing, wrote some poetry, and now lives alone with her dog and listens to Howard Stern every morning. She almost always wears sundresses and knit caps. She calls herself "the kooky lady with the dog."

She's painfully shy, almost skittish. She'll visit our apartment occasionally, but when I knock on hers, she always just cracks the door open and pokes her head out. "I'm painting one wall at a time," she once explained. "I don't want anyone to see it till it's done." She also once told me that I unnerved her because I maintained too much eye contact. (Which is, in fact, a problem for me. I often forget to glance away intermittently during conversations, and have to remind myself to do so; otherwise people will think I'm a psycho who keeps a cup of noses in my freezer.)

Nancy was married for a while after college, but she couldn't have kids. So she's become the unofficial godmother to our son. For the past few months she's been sketching a portrait of him. "I'll be finished soon," she promises. "By the time he takes his SATs."

And today she brings Jasper an early holiday present: a wooden Noah's ark with a menagerie of little painted animals. She thought it'd be good to get him a biblical present. I make Jasper say thank you, a phrase he pronounces without those tiresome consonants, so it sounds like a-ew.

"You know, it's interesting," I say to Nancy as we sit at the kitchen table watching Jasper march the giraffes onto his boat. "I was reading in one of my Bible commentaries about how the flood is such a tragic story--the drowning of millions of people and animals--and how strange it is that it's always made into cute kids' toys."

Nancy looks wounded.

"I didn't . . ." Ugh. What a putz. I had tried to show off my biblical knowledge, and I ended up insulting my only friendly neighbor. The Bible tells us not to be know-it-alls--"A prudent man conceals his knowledge . . ." (Proverbs 12:23).

"I love his ark," I say. "It's adorable . . ."

"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--for my neighbor in 5I.

"Therefore he may lie with you tonight in return for your son's mandrakes." --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 God 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 assisted face on the cover of the 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 "Soy cheese!" which always prompts David to shout a gleefully malicious "T-bone!" (To be technical, Marti has since decided that soy causes health problems, so she now prefers us to say "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 butt.

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 butt. 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 butt.

"I hope this works," Julie told me yesterday. "Because I don't think I can go through this again."

. . . For God is with the generation of the righteous. --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 butt.

I realize that I was what is known in Hebrew as a 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.

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 compassion 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 Japan. 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 God--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 God! 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 tassels, 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 Saturday Night Fever 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.)

Personally, I prefer to think of myself in a more highbrow mold--a biblical version of Tom Wolfe. Or perhaps a modern Emily Dickinson, 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

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 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 is away at a meeting, and Jasper is out with his babysitter. I've seen 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.

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? 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 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 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

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, sex 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 spunky 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 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 God for the sake of others. Abraham is the first to try it, and he's far from successful. It's a curious scene. God 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, God agrees not to smite it.

In the end, though, as you know, Sodom didn't meet the quota.

At first I found the whole passage 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 noble, 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 God 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 class 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 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 compassionate person.

The odd thing, though, is that to be fully compassionate, 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 bypass patients. The patients who knew they were being prayed for actually had 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.

. . . The treacherous are taken captive by their lust. --PROVERBS 11:6

Day 105. So, lust. This week, my job at Esquire has forced the issue. Before I explain, let me confess that lust 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 sex. I try not to talk about sex. 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 sexuality is sinful. Well, some

sexuality is sinful, as anyone with a DSL line can tell you. But I'm having

trouble getting worked up over a moderate amount of sexuality in

culture.

I'm guessing that this has a lot to do with my previous wrestling

matches with sex. In high school and college, I experienced some startling dry spells. To justify my involuntary abstinence, I told myself that

I was above such crass human motivations as sex. I had better things to

do than think about women. And what is sex, 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 shell to transport that brain from place to place. It didn't work. My attempt to stifle my sex drive didn't make me a

more righteous person--I just got more frustrated and unhappy and preoccupied with sex. 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 sexuality 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 sexual 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 glasses, apparently

very aroused by the latest S&P 500 report. Even the suburban-mom character on Dora the Explorer 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.

* The woman in a geisha outfit on the box of Celestial Seasonings tea.

* The photo of a cute chef with the unlikely name of Crescent Dragonwagon on the spine of a cookbook.

* The bosom of Julie's friend Sharon in a photo from our wedding, since said bosom is both ample and prominently displayed.

My censorship raids were actually pleasantly nostalgic. When I was a kid in the 1970s, my dad subscribed to Playboy, which he got, as they say, for the articles. My mom did not approve. Whenever a new Playboy would arrive, my mom would give me a black Magic Marker, and, while Dad was at work, we'd go to town on the latest issue. We'd scribble thick black bikinis on all of the Playmates of the Month and Girls of the Big 10. I liked this a lot. Too much. Mom eventually caught on that I was spending several minutes inspecting each photo before I censored it. So the raids ended.

And these late-2005 censorship raids are about as effective. In other words, they are completely counterproductive. Every time I spot the masking tape, I'm reminded of what lies beneath. It makes me think about sex more, not less.

Anyway, back to my job and lust. Esquire is a tastefully lascivious men's magazine, but lascivious nonetheless. So avoiding sexual imagery there is even more difficult than in my home. And it got worse a few days ago. My bosses decided that it'd be funny to assign me an article about a hot young actress. You know, tempt the Bible guy.

The actress I'm interviewing is named Rosario Dawson. And to be a properly prepared journalist, I have to rent her movies, which is a quandary in itself. Because from the looks of it, there's a good deal of wantonness and harlotry and coveting.

So I joined a movie rental service called CleanFlicks. A Utah-based company started by a Mormon man, CleanFlicks is the Netflix for the highly religious. It sends you sanitized Hollywood movies with the violence and sex chopped out. Also, profanity, including "the B-words, Hword when not referring to the place, D-word, S-word, F-word, etc." (The S-word and F-word I know. But the B-word? The D-word? So many options. It's like working on a dirty New York Times crossword puzzle.)

A week later, I get a couple of DVDs of Rosario's movies in bright yellow envelopes: 25th Hour and Josie and the Pussycats. I pop them into my player. It is a confusing couple of hours. The CleanFlicks films are full of non-sequitur jump cuts and intermittent sound, like what I imagine a Voice over Internet Protocol phone call from Tanzania is like. (When I was finished with Rosario's movies, I couldn't resist ordering Kill Bill on CleanFlicks, because I figured it'd be about five minutes long. It actually broke the hour mark, but made no sense whatsoever.)

A couple of Rosario's movies weren't available on CleanFlicks--but they can be found on one of its competitors, ClearPlay. This is an even more sophisticated bowdlerizing service. You download the censoring filter from the internet and then plug that into a specially equipped DVD player. The beauty of ClearPlay is that you can customize which offensive material to block and which to let through. (Incidentally, CleanFlicks has since been forced to stop cleaning flicks; a Colorado court ruled that it was violating copyright laws by slapping fig leafs on the movies. But ClearPlay is still going strong.)

I download the filter for one of Rosario's movies--Oliver Stone's Alexander--and it looks like I hit the sin mother lode. Take a look at what it's got:

NonSensual/NonCrude Sex Talk Thematic Sexual Situation(s) Homosexual/Lesbian Characters Implied Marital Sex

Implied Premarital Sex

Implied Extramarital Sex Revealing Clothing

Some Suggestive Dancing Some Suggestive Dialogue Threatening Dialogue

Intense Action/Adventure Intense Life/Death Situations Scary Moments

Nongraphic Injury/Wound Intense Battle Sequences Alcohol Consumption

Rape Topic

Intense Thematic Elements Suicide

Murder Topic

Dysfunctional Relationships

In other words, Thursday night at Tommy Lee's house. (My friend David pointed this out; I can't make such comments myself.)

I suppose CleanFlicks and ClearPlay mean well. But they weren't so helpful. I had the same problem as I did with my masking-tape endeavor. I was so focused on what they were cutting out, I probably conjured up far more sinful things in my mind than if I had just watched the suggestive dancing and thematic sexual situation(s) all the way through.

I have made a covenant with my eyes; How then could I look upon a virgin? --JOB 31:1

Day 107. I flew out to Los Angeles yesterday and drove to the hotel. I noticed that my sense of geography has changed. I paid attention to the locations of all the churches and synagogues in the same way that I used to pay attention to pop culture landmarks (Look, that's where they filmed the mall scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High)!

Today is my interview with Rosario. I arrive at our meeting place: an aggressively Californian cafe with organic root beer and whole wheat bagels. Rosario comes a half hour late, as is required by a secret celebrity handbook.

Things start off better than I expected. Yes, she's beautiful, with skin out of a Clinique ad, but she's wearing a bulky beige sweater and jeans. Very discreet, not overly revealing. Second, she seems unfazed by my project. This is L.A., after all, home to calf implants and Crispin Glover, so the strangeness bar is set pretty high.

And, finally, she is one of about three people thus far who claimed my topiary looked good. "I've always loved big beards," she says, adding cryptically, "When I was a kid, I wanted a beard of my own. I thought it'd be nice to stroke it."

So I am feeling good.

And then we start the interview proper. It soon becomes clear that my bosses could not have picked a worse celebrity for me to interview. She is the single most raunchy actress in Hollywood. She has absolutely no ClearPlay-like filter in her brain. Over the course of two hours, I hear about her grandmother's sex life, her sex life, her conception with a broken condom, her breasts, her mom's R-rated piercings, her ex-boyfriend's bedroom noises, and on and on.

I feel like there are three people at this interview: Rosario Dawson, my regular old secular journalist self, and my biblical alter ego.

Every time she talks about the handcuffs you can buy at the Hustler store, my alter ego Jacob winces. Meanwhile, the secular journalist does a silent little cheer. Because I know that a racy quote from a beautiful woman is men's magazine gold.

I have two heads, two sets of eyes, two moral compasses. They're battling for supremacy. Maybe one will win--or maybe I can keep both. A friend of mine said that we shouldn't underestimate people's ability to hold totally contradictory opinions and be just fine with it. It's a uniquely human trait, like speech and blushing.

Sustain me with raisins, refresh me with apples; for I am sick with love.

--SONG OF SOLOMON 2:5

Day 109. Back in New York, I go out to lunch with Robbie Harris--the rock and roll professor from the Jewish Theological Seminary. I tell him about the racy conversation. And he makes a fascinating point: Maybe my secular self and Jacob were fighting each other for no reason.

I had always assumed that the entire Bible had an antilust, protoVictorian point of view. And parts of it--especially passages in the New Testament's letters from the Apostle Paul--do say that celibacy is the ideal.

But much of the Hebrew Bible, if you read it carefully, isn't really antisex. Robbie directed me to the Song of Solomon, which is probably the bawdiest section of the Bible. It's a collection of love songs that contain, among other things, the B-word: "Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies." And later again: "Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples."

The Song of Solomon has sometimes been interpreted as an allegory about humans' love for God. And that may be one aspect of it. But, says Robbie, don't forget that it's also a paean to erotic love.

"But married love, right?" I ask. That's the traditional view, that the

Bible sanctions husband-wife marital relations and nothing else. "They don't sound married to me," says Robbie. "They sound to me

like young lovers hightailing it to the woods."

When I get home, I look up Song of Solomon 2:10-13, one of the

passages Robbie was referring to. It says:

My beloved speaks and says to me: "Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away;

for lo, the winter is past,

the rain is over and gone.

The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come . . . . . . Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away."

He's right. It does sound like a couple of not-necessarily-married kids off for a tryst in the wilderness. This is liberating information.

You shall not commit adultery. --EXO D U S 20:14

Day 110. The Bible isn't a free-love manual, though. Not all types of sex are permitted. The Bible forbids bestiality and incest. It famously calls homosexuality an "abomination," a troubling (to put it mildly) notion that I'll talk more about later.

And, of course, it bans adultery.

But I should clarify: Adultery in the Hebrew Bible is not what modern Americans think of as adultery. It's a much narrower concept. Adultery means sex with a married woman. Married women are not allowed to sleep around. They're off-limits. Married men, on the other hand . . . well, they have more leeway--as long as the woman who is the object of their lust doesn't already belong to another Israelite man.

And I use the word belong on purpose. The ancient Israelite culture was passionate about some forms of social justice, but gender equality was not high on the list. Women belonged to men. You can't sleep with a married woman because it's an affront both to God and to her husband's rights. And if you sleep with a virgin, you should make sure that her father is compensated properly.

The compensation could take the form of paying off the father. Or you could take the woman off his hands and marry her.

Now here's the interesting thing: You could marry the woman even if you already have another wife. Polygamy was, if not the norm, completely accepted. The Hebrew Bible is packed with examples of polygamy. Jacob had two wives (and two concubines). King David had eight. Solomon holds the record with seven hundred wives. (Solomon's proverbs warn against adultery, which I find curious, since I can't imagine he had any time or energy for other men's wives.)

Ashkenazi Judaism officially banned multiple wives in the eleventh century, when the great French rabbi Gershom ben Judah laid down the one-spouse-only law. But you can still find a handful of Jews who want a return to the old days. As one propolygamy Jewish web page says: "Polygamy is a Jewish institution. It is practiced, albeit underground, in Israel today. If the present trend to Orthodoxy among Jews continues, we can expect open polygamy to return soon."

Christianity hasn't had much polygamy in its history, with the famous exception of early Mormonism and a handful of outlying sects of fundamentalist Christianity that got a little bump in publicity when HBO's multiple-wives drama Big Love debuted a couple of years ago.

One such sect is called the Christian Polygamy Movement. It is headed by an Arizona-based man named Pastor Don Milton. Most of his justification seems to lie in the fact that the great men of the Hebrew Bible had many wives. The New Testament, contrary to popular opinion, does not overturn this, he says.

Yes, the Apostle Paul did say that "each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband" (1 Corinthians 7:2). But here's the catch: Pastor Don says the Greek word for own in that sentence doesn't mean "one and only." The marriage is still a sacred covenant between one man and one woman. It's just that the man can have several simultaneous covenants--sort of like a psychologist and his clients.

I call up Pastor Don and ask him, "If I'm trying to follow the Bible, and I'm interested in having a second wife, how do I convince my current wife that this is a good idea?"

Pastor Don pauses, then says, "You don't want to bring it up unless you have a prospective second wife."

"Why is that?"

"What if you tell your first wife and then never meet anyone that you wanted to be your second wife? You'll end up causing a rift in your current marriage for nothing."

In fact, Pastor Don continues, I might want to consider the preemptive strike--a strategy he's seen employed successfully over the years.

"You find a prospective wife, have a ceremony, and consummate the marriage. Then go back and tell the first wife that you have a second. There is conceivably a better chance that your first marriage will survive."

Isn't that a bit . . . sneaky and unbiblical?

"It can end up being more cruel to put a wife through a year, five years, ten years of worrying that you're going to take a second wife."

Pastor Don's tone is friendly, informal. His website has a lot of fire and brimstone, warning detractors that "You are required by it [the Bible] to confront me in person if you accuse me of sin, then with witnesses to the alleged sin (Deuteronomy 19:16), and finally before a Christian assembly worthy of wielding its authority over us." But on the phone, Pastor Don's tone is that of a married man giving his bachelor buddy some girlfriend advice.

I ask Pastor Don if I should tell the prospective second wife about the first wife. Definitely, he says. You have to. And the good part is, it might even be a turn-on.

"Some women are drawn to men who are bold enough to say they have more than one wife. It's a bad-boy thing."

I ask him if he has any other tips about making the first wife see the light.

"First, pray like you've prayed only when you're in trouble. Then bring her into Bible study."

Show her that the Bible doesn't forbid polygamy. And, in fact, the Old Testament heroes were often polygamous. "You have to get her to see that the men of the Old Testament were great men. David--he wrote the Psalms! And Solomon--he wrote the Proverbs. These are great men. Get that point across. Polygamy is not only acceptable, but it's fabulous, and these women [the wives] are holy."

In fact, says Pastor Don, the father of the human race probably had several ceremonies.

"I think Adam was the first polygamist. Here was the healthiest man in history with the healthiest sex drive ever. And he had only one wife? Come on."

Pastor Don asks me if I have a prospective second wife.

"Well, I do like our nanny," I say. Des is, indisputably, adorable-- she's twenty-six and text messages me things like "gud am," which take me five minutes to figure out (that's "good morning," for all you overthirty people out there). Julie agrees she's ideal, and has given me permission to have an affair with her, a la Curb Your Enthusiasm. Of course, Julie gave me the offer only because she knew there was no chance Des would ever be interested. It's like giving me permission to become a linebacker with the Miami Dolphins. Completely moot.

"What religion is she?"

"She's Catholic."

Pastor Don exhales loudly. Catholics are tough to crack, he says. On the other hand, if I ever do marry Des, I have a good line of reasoning when I tell Julie.

"You can tell her that you can stop paying the nanny. Save on the price."

At one point, Pastor Don's voice rises, and I imagine on the other end of the line, his face is red and a vein has popped up on his forehead. He is talking about the persecution against polygamists. He is furious that they would put polygamists in jail--next to criminals and homosexuals.

Yes, homosexuality. Apparently, polygamists aren't so tolerant of other types of sexual behavior.

You shall not steal. --EXO D U S 20:15

Day 111. When I'm jotting down tips on how to land a second wife, it's clear that the pendulum has swung too far into the Bible's crazy territory. I need to refocus. Get back to basics. The Ten Commandments. So I'm going to delve into the Eighth again: Thou shalt not steal.

Actually, many modern biblical scholars think that the word steal is a mistranslation. A closer word would be kidnap. You should not kidnap people and force them into slavery. This would be easier to follow. I could do that for a year. But it also feels like a cop-out.

So I'm going to stick with the traditional on this one, especially since there are plenty of other "do not steal" commands in the Bible (such as Leviticus 19:11).

I informed Julie that I can no longer raid the Esquire supply closet for manila folders for personal use. I've also stopped with the wireless piggybacking--we've seen what that can lead to.

And today I clamp down on some attempted theft at Starbucks. We are out for a walk: Julie, Jasper, and Julie's stepdad, who looks and acts exactly like George Burns. We stop for a coffee at Starbucks, and Jasper grabs a handful of straws from the counter. He's got a straw fetish. He loves to unwrap a dozen or so at a shot, perhaps thinking that the next one will have a special surprise, maybe a Willy Wonka-like invitation to tour the straw factory.

"No, Jasper. Just one."

Starbucks doesn't have a strict straw policy. But I think there's an implicit contract--you are supposed to take one straw for every beverage.

Does Starbucks need my money? Not so much. But the Bible's command is absolute. It doesn't say "Thou shalt not steal except for small things from multinational corporations with a faux Italian name for medium." It says, "Thou shalt not steal." There's no such thing as "petty theft."

"Just one," I repeat.

"Let him take 'em," says Julie's stepdad.

"No, we're supposed to take only one. Otherwise it's stealing." "Let him take a few. It's not stealing."

"What if I took five thousand straws in a Starbucks every day?" I

say. "Would that be stealing?"

"Well, there's got to be a relative--"

"Why? Why should it be relative?"

"Well, look," says Julie's stepdad. "One murder is OK. But fifty

murders isn't OK."

I'm stopped short.

"Got you there, huh?" he says.

I'm not sure how to answer a man who has stolen my argument. Jasper screams and grunts and points for about forty-five seconds. I

stand my ground; I've got to ratchet up that justice-to-mercy ratio. Finally, I give him a napkin to rip up, which calms him down.

I could have rationalized the straws. That's one thing I've noticed this year. I can rationalize almost anything. For instance, I could take the utilitarian approach: The amount of pleasure it gives Jasper outweighs the couple of cents it'll cost Starbucks. Or I could argue to myself that, in the end, it helps out the struggling straw industry.

Same with when I stole the internet connection in my apartment building; I could have rationalized it by saying that I was using the internet to learn about God and make myself a better person.

I have a tendency toward ends-justify-the-means thinking. But this year isn't about that. It's about following the rules. Strictly. To the letter. And seeing what happens.

I know of only one other person who follows the "no stealing" commandment to the letter. My dad. Whenever we're on a road trip, he refuses to pull over at any old Holiday Inn or McDonald's to use the bathroom. Not unless we buy something. Otherwise, he says, we'd be stealing their soap and paper towels. So I feel like I'm honoring my father here as well.

She quickly let down her jar from her shoulder, and said, "Drink, and I will give your camels drink also." --GENESIS 24:46

Day 114. Mr. Berkowitz, the man who inspected my wardrobe for mixed fibers, is still calling. He wants to meet up and pray with me, but I've been busy with my own biblical duties and my own prayers, so I've been dodging his calls.

This morning, he leaves me a message at eight-thirty.

"Hello, Arnold," he says. (He calls me by my real name, Arnold; I must have told him about it once, and it somehow stuck.) "It's Bill Berkowitz. It's very important that you call me back."

I get nervous. Very important? That sounds bad. Maybe he's got a kidney stone and needs help getting to Mount Sinai Hospital. I phone him--it turns out he's going to be in my neighborhood and wants to pray with me at my apartment. Well, how can I refuse a house call?

Mr. Berkowitz arrives a couple of hours later, and he's as disheveled and kindly as ever. He comes bearing gifts: books and candles for the Sabbath.

"Can I get you anything?"

"A cup of water, please," he says. "Oh, and it has to be bottled water, please."

Oh, yes. I'd heard of this. A few rabbis in Brooklyn had made a controversial ruling declaring New York City tap water nonkosher. They said it contained tiny multicellular organisms that could qualify as forbidden crustaceans. Which is why, if you want to make a lot of money, you should open a Poland Spring concession in Crown Heights.

I look in the fridge. We have bottles of Dasani, but Julie refills them from the faucet. Tap water in Dasani clothing.

"Can I offer you anything else?" I ask. "Maybe juice? Soda?" "No. Water."

Here I face a dilemma. The poor guy has schlepped several miles from Washington Heights in a thick black coat and black hat. No doubt he's parched. And the Bible tells me to ease my fellow man's suffering.

So I decide: What he doesn't know won't hurt him. And lots of rabbis say the tap water is fine to drink. Everyone will be happier.

I pour him a cup from the bottle.

"Thanks," says Mr. Berkowitz, as he lifts the cup to his lips, then puts it down to tell me something about the Sabbath. I'm not sure what he said. I'm too busy staring at that cup. He does it again, like the clueless husband in a forties noir film who keeps almost--but not quite-- sipping the poisoned milk.

Finally, before he can actually drink, I lunge.

"You know what? I think this may be refilled with tap water."

Mr. Berkowitz is grateful. He puts the cup on the table gingerly, like it's filled with hydrochloric acid.

I just couldn't do it. What if, on the off-chance, Mr. Berkowitz is right? What if the water would have tainted his soul? I couldn't take the risk, even if his body will suffer.

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. --GENESIS 22:3

Mr. Berkowitz says it'd be good for me to get a minute-by-minute guide to the properly devout day. So he starts at the beginning: I should wake up early, just like Abraham woke up early on the day he was to sacrifice Isaac.

"Abraham didn't say, 'Hey, God, it's five o'clock in the morning. You sure you want me to get up so early?' Abraham got up early."

After that, there are many rituals to be done: You must wash impurities off your hands. Recite several prayers. Bind the commandments to your hand and forehead. Go to the synagogue to worship. Mr. Berkowitz tells me he loves going to synagogue; it's not an obligation, it's a gift. I'm jealous; I want that kind of hunger for spirituality.

He hates being late to prayer, so he lays out all of his religious gear the night before: his prayer shawl, his fringes, and so forth.

"It's like a fireman," he says. "The fireman has his hat, jacket, and boots on a peg, so when there's a fire, he doesn't have to think. Everything is set up."

He once again stresses the importance of being punctual to services.

"If it means I have to run with my shoelaces untied, then I will."

Mr. Berkowitz pauses, then decides he's gone too far.

"Well, I don't do that. That's an exaggeration. But I like to be on time. I don't want to run like a madman. I walk briskly."

Speaking of shoes, Mr. Berkowitz tells me that you don't just put them on any old way. There's a proper procedure. You put on your right shoe. Then your left shoe. Then you tie your left shoe. Then you go back and tie your right shoe.

Why that order? Mr. Berkowitz doesn't know.

"That's what the rabbis tell us to do. I don't have to think about it. It saves me a lot of thinking. It allows me to concentrate on more important things."

If this were on TiVo, I would have rewound it to make sure he said what I think he said. How much thinking could that possibly save? Do I really waste a lot of brainpower deciding the order in which I should slip on my Rockports? It seems like some serious religious micromanagement. I didn't want to say this to the sweet and no-doubt-thirsty Mr. Berkowitz, who was on to the next topic, but at the time, I thought: "crazy."

In retrospect, though, I'm starting to think that maybe it's not completely insane. My dad always talked about how his hero Albert Einstein owned seven identical suits, so that he wouldn't waste any neuronal activity on choosing what to wear. Similar idea.

In fact, it's part of a bigger theme I've been mulling over: freedom from choice. I'd always been taught to fetishize freedom of choice. It's the American way. It's why I went to Brown University, where they don't have any requirements, and you can go through all four years writing papers about the importance of Christian Slater's oeuvre.

But more and more I'm starting to see the beauty in a more rigid framework. The structure, the stable architecture of religion.

My brother-in-law Eric--now getting his doctorate in psychology-- likes to lecture me about an experiment at a grocery store by researchers from Columbia and Stanford. They set up two tables offering free tastes; one table had six flavors of jam, the other had twenty-four flavors of jam. Oddly, more people bought jams from the table with six flavors. Nearly ten times more people, in fact. The conclusion was that the big table was just too overwhelming, too many options.

The Bible takes away a lot of those jam jars. What should I do on Friday night? Stay at home with the family. Should I waste my time reading about Cameron Diaz's love life? No. Should I give to the homeless guy on 77th? Yes. Should I be stricter with Jasper? Yes. There's something relieving and paradoxically liberating about surrendering yourself to a minimal-choice lifestyle, especially as our choices multiply like cable channels.

I recently heard a rabbi give a talk on Moses, and how, in a weird sense, he was a slave even after his release from bondage. He was a slave to goodness. He had no choice but to do the right thing.

There's a Jewish book that restricts choice even more--far more-- than the Bible itself. It's a massive work from the sixteenth century called the Set Table--or Shulchan Aruch in Hebrew. It's an amazing book; it gives practical instruction on everything you can think of: eating, sleeping, praying, bathing, sex. Some Orthodox Jews follow a lot of the Set Table's guidelines, but it'd be darn near impossible to follow every directive. There are thousands of them. One stipulates that when going to the bathroom outside, you should face north or south but not east or west.

Most of the Set Table's rules are postbiblical. The Scriptures don't get into shoe-donning procedures per se. But the Bible still has plenty of laws to keep me busy--some that I like (the Sabbath) and some I don't (monthly wife avoidance). The key question seems to be: How do you choose which choice-restricting rules to follow in the first place? I don't know. It's like an M. C. Escher drawing. It hurts my brain.

Mr. Berkowitz, by the way, finished his lesson and the prayers, and left about an hour later. As he said goodbye, he reminded me to prepare for Sabbath by reciting a little ditty:

A Shabbos well spent Brings a week of content.

I agree with the sentiment, if not the grammar.

I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.

--DEUTERONOMY 5:9

Day 117. My son, Jasper, has finally improved his vocabulary, but not in the way I was hoping. And I'm the one to blame.

Perhaps I can explain what happened via a quick biblical story: In Genesis 12, Abraham traveled to Egypt with his beautiful wife, Sarah, to escape a famine. Sarah was so stunning, Abraham feared that the Egyptians would kill him and steal Sarah for themselves. So Abraham lied. He said that Sarah was his sister. Abraham took the deception so far that the Pharaoh, thinking Sarah was single, married her. And when the Pharaoh found out that he'd been deceived, he was--somewhat justifiably, I think--furious, and ejected Abraham from the land.

Abraham and Sarah eventually conceived a son named Isaac. When he's grown, Isaac and his wife Rebecca moved to the land of the Philistines to avoid a famine. And what does Isaac do? He pretends Rebecca is his sister. He doesn't want the Philistines to kill him and steal Rebecca.

This is a big recurring theme in the Bible: Children mimic their parents' behavior, even the flaws, perhaps especially the flaws. (One other example: Rebecca played favorites with her son Jacob; Jacob played favorites with his son Joseph.)

I've always known that parents influence their kids. It's not an obscure concept. But it didn't sink in on a gut level until I saw Jasper aping our words and deeds.

I first noticed it when he adopted one of Julie's more endearing habits. After Julie takes a sip of a drink, she'll often let out a satisfied "Ahhh," like she's secretly taping a Sprite commercial. Now Jasper is doing it. He'll polish off his watered-down apple juice, plunk the sippy cup on the table, and exhale noisily.

But with me, it's taken a darker turn. A few days ago, Jasper's Elmo plate slipped out of my grasp, scattering cubes of cantaloupe all over the kitchen. I shouted a four-letter word that is a synonym for the biblical verb "to know." (I'd type it here, but I think that'd be breaking the rules again.) Apparently Jasper was paying close attention. He has now decided this is a great word. It has replaced the perfectly acceptable "uhoh" as the go-to exclamation.

When I've seen kids cursing on TV or in the movies, it's kind of adorable. When my two-year-old niece said the S-word? I chuckled. But when my own kid squeaks out swear words in his high-pitched voice, it's not funny at all. I immediately picture him fifteen years down the road with a syringe sticking out of his arm sprawled on the floor of some train station bathroom.

In Deuteronomy 5:9 the Bible says "I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me." I used to find this an appalling sentence. Why should God punish my grandson for my sins? It seemed outrageously un-American. What about everyone being entitled to a clean moral slate? And, yes, if you interpret this as a threat that God will smite your child with leprosy when you worship a carved idol, then absolutely, it's cruel.

But I've come to appreciate it. The trick is, you have to see the passage as a warning that your moral failings will affect your kids' ability to make the right choices. If you beat your son, he'll be more likely to beat his son. If you get angry at cantaloupe-related mishaps, your son will too. What better deterrent could there be to bad behavior?

It had even more resonance in biblical times. As Jack Miles points out in his excellent book God: A Biography, ancient Israelites didn't have the clearly formed concept of immortality of the soul, as we do now. You achieved immortality through your children and children's children, who were physical extensions of you. The basic building block of society was the family, not the individual.

With no afterlife, God dispensed justice to a family--a person's actions reverberate through his descendants' lives. The most extreme example: When Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the fruit of knowledge, the family of humanity has been paying ever since.

I can't say why for sure--maybe the Bible has seeped into my brain, maybe there's an inevitable mental shift that accompanies parenthood-- but I've edged away from extreme individualism. My worldview is more interconnected, more tribal.

Ask now, and see, can a man bear a child? --JEREMIAH 30:6

Day 120. On this brisk December morning, Julie and I trek to the fertility clinic on the East Side. They've been steeping two of Julie's eggs in a test tube for five days. The doctors are implanting both, in the hope that one will stick.

Man, does it feel unnatural. Surgical caps, antibacterial lotion, gurneys, charts. This is about as far from Adam and Eve as you can get.

They wheel Julie out a few minutes later. And it is done. She is, God willing, pregnant. For reasons I still don't understand, Julie has to lie in a hospital bed with a full bladder for about a half hour.

"Distract me, please!" says Julie. "Talk about anything."

I start in on a biblical story about Tamar.

"Anything but that."

OK. But it's a good story, a relevant story--and a profoundly strange story. Julie, feel free to skip this section, but here goes:

Tamar's tale is found in the Book of Genesis. Tamar was married to a man named Er, son of Judah. Er died before they could have kids. There was a custom in biblical times--as bizarre as it sounds now--that a widow who has no children stays within the family: She must marry the brother of her dead husband. It's called "levirate marriage." So Tamar married Er's younger brother, Onan. Onan, too, died. Tamar was understandably distraught. Two husbands, two deaths. But her fatherin-law, Judah, told Tamar not to worry--she could marry his youngest son, Shelah. But Judah failed to follow through. Tamar was left without a husband.

Tamar was desperate to get pregnant. So she came up with a plan: She put on a veil, disguised herself as a prostitute, and intercepted her father-in-law, Judah, as he was on his way to shear his sheep. The unsuspecting Judah slept with Tamar, and then gave her his staff and personal seal as a IOU for payment. The plan worked. She got pregnant.

Judah, unaware he had been duped, found out that his widowed daughter-in-law was with child and accused her of loose morals. He wanted her burned to death. So Tamar showed him his staff and personal seal. Now he understood. He was the father of her child. He backed down and repented. Tamar had twin sons by Judah. They were named Zerah and Perez. And here's an interesting twist: Perez eventually became the ancestor of that remarkable leader of ancient Israel, King David.

When I first read this, it was too outlandish to have any meaning for me. A woman having sex with her father-in-law? In a prostitute disguise? But after rereading it four times, I've wrung a powerful moral out of it. And that is this: Even great things can be born from ethically murky origins. Even an illicit, deceit-filled union can lead to someone like King David.

So . . . perhaps in vitro fertilization is the same. It's ethically complicated, but maybe our child will be great. Or maybe I'm justifying like crazy here.

In the end, I do end up distracting Julie by finding some common ground. We play a name-a-movie-with-a-biblical-title game.

I will never forget thy precepts, for by them thou hast given me life. --PSALMS 119:93

Day 122. It's New Year's Eve, and Julie and I pull our rental car into the driveway of our friends' house in New Jersey. We'll be staying there for a three-day weekend.

After hellos and avoided hugs, I lug our suitcase upstairs to the guest room, heave it onto the bed, unzip it--and immediately realize my mistake. I forgot to bring my ram's horn. It's back in my closet in New York. Damn. I won't be able to blow a horn on January 1, the start of the new month.

I try to argue with myself that, well, January 1 isn't the Hebrew calendar, so maybe it's not really a new biblical month. Doesn't help. I feel surprisingly anxious and off-kilter, like I'm back in high school and forgot to study for a big physics exam. I take it out on Julie by picking a fight with her about the volume of Jasper's baby monitor.

The truth is, I've begun to get really rigorous with my rituals. I hate missing my daily routine--the praying, the binding, more praying, the tassels, the white clothes, the praying again. Why? Perhaps because these rituals dovetail beautifully with my obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Thanks to my OCD, I'm prone to weird little rituals, like touching the shower head four times after turning off the faucet. Or opening my jaw into a yawnlike position whenever I look in the mirror. Or making sure never to start a conversation with the word you because when I was eleven I saw an Eight Is Enough episode in which an estranged father's first words to his son were "You doing all right?" and the relationship went sour after that--probably not because the father started his sentence with "you," but you never know.

I've been doing my own rituals less and less frequently, as the Bible rituals take over more and more of my time. And why not? People have been doing these Bible rituals for thousands of years. They're time tested. Why should I try to invent my own ceremonies, when my heritage provides me with a book full of them? Mr. Berkowitz doesn't waste his days concocting his own rituals; he takes them off the rack.

At least in this way, I'm preprogrammed for biblical living. Religion--especially ritual-heavy religions like Judaism and HighChurch Christianity--have three key OCD traits. First, the repetition (every day the same prayers, every week the same candle-lightings). Second, the fascination with taxonomy--everything in its proper category: good or evil, holy or profane. And third, especially in Judaism, the fixation on purity and impurity (the equivalent of my constant hand washing). I'm drawn to all three.

Of course, I'm not the first to make this connection. Sigmund Freud, a Jew who, as a child, regularly attended Catholic mass with his Czech nanny, believed that religion was the "universal obsessional neurosis of humanity."

If so, I think it can be a healthy neurosis. I'm more open to the chukim nowadays: those inexplicable commandments such as keeping apart wool and linen. Without realizing it, I had been practicing my own selfgenerated chukim for years. How long had I wasted turning on and off the radio because I needed the final word to be a noun? Compared to my radio ritual, strapping commandments to my forehead looks positively rational. Instead of compulsively repeating the list of my freshman year classes--French, math, biology, and so on (don't ask)--I compulsively repeat certain passages from the Bible that I am mandated to remember. Like, that God gave us the commandments. And that God brought us out of Israel. And gave us the Sabbath. And that God instructed us to blow a horn at the start of every month.

Month Five: January

Do not pay attention to every word people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you--for you know in your heart that many times you yourself have cursed others.

--ECCLESIASTES 7:21-22 (NIV)

Day 124. January 2. We're back in New York. I'm not supposed to make New Year's resolutions--probably a pagan ritual--but if I did, here's what mine would be: I have to start thickening my skin. It's right there in the Ecclesiastes: Don't pay attention to everything everyone says about you; you know you've talked trash about other people, too.

Today I was reading the Amazon.com reviews for my encyclopedia book (I know, not biblical), and I ran across one that was very strange. The reviewer said she looked at my author photo and discovered that I'm not really that ugly. In fact, I'm kind of "normal looking." Which I guess is sort of flattering. Normal looking.

But she didn't mean it as flattery. She said that I'm normal-looking enough that I have no excuse to be socially awkward, neurotic, or beset with an inferiority complex. So I should shut my normal-looking trap and stop complaining. This is the most backhanded compliment I've ever received. It sank me into a bad mood for three hours. The Bible is right: I have to toughen up.

And I must, absolutely must, stop self-Googling. It's a horrible habit that I still haven't kicked in my biblical year. I found one blogger in Singapore who got my book for a birthday present, though he seemed more excited about another present, a T-shirt that read, "I'm Looking for Treasure. Can I See Your Chest?" I've done image searches on myself, and found an outtake from an appearance on C-Span's Book TV where the website froze on a particularly unflattering moment that makes me resemble Sean Penn in I Am Sam.

This is all very unrighteous, very vain. I should think instead of the well-being of my family and my neighbors--and on God.

I should be more like Noah. It took Noah decades to build his ark. Can you imagine the mockery he must have received from doubting neighbors? If Noah were alive today, he wouldn't be wasting his time checking out what blogs said about him. He'd be down at Home Depot buying more lumber. Starting today, I'm going to be like Noah. Toughen up.

You shall teach them diligently to your children.

--DEUTERONOMY 6:7

Day 126. There's one upside to my son not talking a lot: I don't have to figure out what to tell him about God yet. Because I have no idea what to say.

The subject came up at dinner tonight with our friends Jessica and Peter, up from Washington, D.C., for a visit. Here's how Jessica answered the question when their daughter asked her about God.

"I told her God is in the wind, in the trees, He's in the rocks, He's everywhere."

Her husband Peter looks dismayed.

"Well, maybe not everywhere," says Peter.

"Yes, everywhere," says Jessica.

"God's in that cement mixer?"

"Yes," she says.

"In the forklift?"

"Yes, why not?" says Jessica.

Peter shakes his head. "You've got to draw the line somewhere."

But I know what Jessica is saying. In the past couple of weeks, I've taken not quite a leap of faith, but a cautious baby step of faith. I'm not sure why. I think it's that the three-times-a-day prayers are working their mojo.

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.

I spend a lot of time marveling. I haven't stared at a forklift yet, but I'll marvel at the way rain serpentines down a car window. Or I'll marvel at the way my reflection is distorted in a bowl. I feel like I just took my first bong hit. I feel like Wes Bentley rhapsodizing about that dancing plastic bag in American Beauty.

I've noticed that I sometimes walk around with a lighter step, almost an ice-skating-like glide, because the ground feels hallowed. All of the ground, even the ground outside the pizzeria near my apartment building.

All well and good, right? The only thing is, this is not the God of the Israelites. This is not the God of the Hebrew Scriptures. That God is an interactive God. He rewards people and punishes them. He argues with them, negotiates with them, forgives them, occasionally smites them. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures has human emotions--love and anger.

My God doesn't. My God is impersonal. My God is the God of Spinoza. Or the God of Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian who believed that God was "the ground of being." Or the God of the Jedi knights. It's a powerful but vague all-pervasive force; some slightly more sophisticated version of pantheism. I don't even know if my God can be said to have a grand plan, much less mood swings. Can I keep edging toward the true biblical God? I'm not sure.

And the Lord said to me, "Arise, go on your journey . . ."

--DEUTERONOMY 10:11

Day 127. Before I buy my tickets to Israel, I want to make sure my exuncle Gil will be there. I get his phone number from an Orthodox friend of mine in Israel, which was surprisingly easy. And I call.

My plan is to make it a stealth mission. I won't reveal that I'm his former nephew. That's not lying, right? That's just omission of information. If he doesn't know I'm an ex-relative, he can't think that I'm giving him tacit approval, the family's big fear.

I dial the fourteen digits. The phone rings.

My heart is thumping. I haven't been this nervous since I called Julie for our first date.

"Hello?"

I don't know what I expected--a booming voice speaking Aramaic?--but his pitch was a regular old midrange American.

"Is Gil there?"

"Speaking."

"Yes, well, I'm a writer, and I'm writing a book about trying to live by the Bible, and I'm coming to Israel, and--"

"What's your name?"

Part of me was hoping I could just be known as "the Writer." So what do I do now? Should I give him a fake name? That would be lying. Well, maybe he won't know my name. I've never met him, and I have a different last name from his ex-wife.

"My name is A. J. Jacobs"

"Oh! You're related to my daughters."

Well, there goes that theory. We set a date for me to come to his house for dinner. I'm tense enough about breaking the family taboo that it takes me three hours to go to sleep.

You shall write them on the doorposts of your house . . .

--DEUTERONOMY 6:9

Day 128. I've devoted a lot of time both to my physical appearance and my soul. But I feel I haven't sufficiently Bibli-fied my house. The only thing I've done is to strip our apartment of those images that verge on idolatry, even if it's of the celebrity kind: the poster of Ray Charles at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the half-dozen photos of Julie standing next to celebrities she accosted at events or on the street. (Julie with a reluctant Willem Dafoe, Julie with a skeptical Tupac Shakur, et cetera.)

So today, as instructed in Deuteronomy, I'm going to write a section of the Bible on our doorpost. I tell Julie, who has two stern commandments of her own.

1. Do not, under any circumstances, let Jasper see you write on the doorpost. We've been battling his tendency toward crayon abuse. This would not help.

2. Please, please do it in pencil. "I don't want to get a call from the co-op board about this. I don't want to have to pay for a painter."

I promise.

At the end of the Israelites' forty-year journey in the desert, Moses commanded them to write God's words on their doorposts and their gates. It's the origin of the mezuzah--the diagonally positioned box that we (and most other Jews) have nailed at the entrance to our homes.

The tradition has been to delegate the writing of the mezuzah to an officially sanctioned scribe. It all comes prepackaged. But the Bible's literal wording--and presumably what some Israelites did back in ancient times--says that we should write on our door frames ourselves.

But what to write? Moses says "these words which I command you." I briefly considered trying to squeeze in hundreds of commandments in tiny font but settled on the famous ten--they appear in the Bible right before the doorpost passage. (Incidentally, traditional mezuzahs instead have a scroll that contains famous prayer known as the Shema: "Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God. The Lord is One!")

I get out my No. 2 Officemate pencil, make sure that Jasper is safely distracted by Legos, prop open the front door, and start slowly, very slowly, writing God's words on the avocado-colored door frame. It takes an hour. All the while I am inhaling the mysterious odor that always wafts from apartment 5R (I think they have an illegal albacore cannery in there), taking a break between every commandment to shake out my wrist and elbow, and being vigilant not to make a stray loop or spike.

At first I feel absurd, like a biblical version of Bart Simpson at the chalkboard. Absurd and nervous--am I committing an egregious sin by ignoring the centuries-old tradition? Orthodox Jews might say so. Probably would say so. There are an astounding 4,649 instructions that go into creating a certified mezuzah. You must write with a quill taken from a kosher bird, like a goose or a turkey. The scroll must have twenty-two lines. And on and on. By comparison, I am winging it.

But after a half hour, I sink into a quasitrance. I haven't done any monklike copying by hand in years--not since the invention of digital cut and paste, anyway. But there's something to it. You are forced to linger over every letter, every cadence. You absorb the text. It's the difference between walking to town and taking the bus--you can't help but notice the scenery.

I notice the minimalist beauty of commandments six, seven, and eight:

You shall not kill.

You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal.

And I notice the syncopated rhythm of the list of people banned from working on the Sabbath: "You, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates."

I think about how every word that I am writing has launched a thousand debates. Even something as straightforward as: You shall not kill.

This is widely regarded as a mistranslation. The Old Testament features plenty of God-sanctioned killing--from capital punishment of blasphemers to the annihilation of enemies. The actual commandment is more like: You shall not murder.

Nothing is free from dispute, even the number ten. Depending on how you parse the language, you could argue that it's actually the Thirteen Commandments. "You shall not make for yourself a graven image" is one commandment. "You shall not bow down to them" is another. But those two are generally lumped together.

They are deceptively simple, those Ten Commandments.

Do not go around as a gossiper among your people . . . --LEVITICUS 19:16

Day 131. I keep thinking back to Amos, the harmonica-playing Amish man, and how he answered most questions with a monosyllable or a nod. And that's if you were lucky. Sometimes he just stared over your shoulder until the silence got so unbearable that you asked another question.

I'm no Amos, but I feel myself drifting in his direction. Guard your tongue, I tell myself. Ration those words. Just nod your head and smile and don't get provoked when they say "Hey, chatterbox, over there!" as my coworkers did at a recent Esquire dinner at an Italian restaurant.

I feel I have to clam up. It's the best way to battle the overwhelming urge to spew biblically banned negative language. The pastor out to pasture, Elton Richards, gave me a good metaphor on this topic: think of negative speech as verbal pollution. And that's what I've been doing: visualizing insults and gossip as a dark cloud, maybe one with some sulfur dioxide. Once you've belched it out, you can't take it back. As grandma said, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

The interesting thing is, the less often I vocalize my negative thoughts, the fewer negative thoughts I cook up in the first place. My theory is, my thoughts are lazy. They say to themselves, "Well, we'll never make it out into the world, so why even bother?" It's more powerful than repression. The thoughts don't even form enough to require being repressed.

Yes, the sales guy at the biblical bookstore sold me a hardcover copy of What Would Jesus Eat? when, as I found out today, there's a paperback version that costs ten dollars less. But I refuse to complain about him to Julie. Maybe he didn't know, or maybe he thought I'd prefer a good durable cover for posterity. I refuse to let that toxic cloud gather in my brain. It's a purifying feeling, the verbal equivalent of wearing white clothes.

Tonight, over dinner with Julie, I was in fine no-negative-speech form. My wife's job is all about creating fun; she works for a company that organizes scavenger hunts--they do corporate events, public events, bar mitzvahs--but apparently her day had not been fun at all.

She had this client who insisted on doing an outdoor event. Julie told her that it would be much better to do the scavenger hunt indoors this time of year, but the client said no. And, of course, the day turned out to be ear-numbingly cold. And now the client is freaking out and demanding a refund.

"She is such a pain in the ass," says Julie.

I don't know this woman. Technically, I shouldn't say harmful speech about her.

"It's a difficult situation."

"I told her three times to do the hunt indoors, and she refused to listen," says Julie.

"Maybe next time will be better."

"I hope to God there won't be a next time."

"Sounds like she has some pluses and minuses, just like everyone."

"What?"

"Everyone has their good and bad sides."

"What does that mean? 'Everyone has their good and bad sides.'"

"Well, it sounds like there was an unfortunate lack of communication."

"There was no freakin' lack of communication. I told her to do it, and she ignored me."

Julie paused.

"Why aren't you supporting me?"

"I am. But I don't want to say anything negative. It's gossip. Lashon hara."

"Well, you sound like a creepy child psychologist."

I'm jolted. But she's right. I do sound ridiculous. I faced one of the many cases in which two biblical commandments butted heads: The commandment to refrain from gossip and the commandment to treat my wife as I would have her treat me. I chose the wrong one. I should have broken the ban against negative speech. Even absolutism must have exceptions.

I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore.

--GENESIS 22:17

Day 132. It's been twelve days since our visit to the clinic, and Julie and I just got the call from the nurse. She should have some news. Julie takes the call on the black cordless in our living room.

"Uh-huh. Uh-huh."

Julie smiles. Gives me the thumbs-up.

She's pregnant! Yes!

She gives another thumbs-up, this time with an overly clenched

smile.

"OK. Yeah. Thanks."

Julie clicks off the phone. She's not just pregnant--she's really pregnant. Her hormone levels show that she's probably carrying twins. The doctor put in two fertilized eggs, and they both appear to have stuck.

Huh. Twins.

I knew there was a higher chance of twins with IVF, but still. That's hard to process. I always felt ambivalent about taking the "be fruitful and multiply" commandment too far. The world is in the midst of a scary Malthusian population boom--I had figured that two kids would be about right for me.

Julie and I sit on the couch together, stunned silent for a minute.

"Two-for-one deal," she says flatly. "Double the fun."

I guess compared to biblical families--Jacob had thirteen kids, David had at least fifteen--three isn't too bad. Be thankful, I remind myself. Be thankful.

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, And pay your vows to the Most High.

--PSALMS 50:14

Day 133. Twins are, to use religious language, a mixed blessing. But they are a blessing nonetheless.

Two kids. It's no doubt the biggest news I've gotten all year, and I decide that I need to express my gratitude somehow. I need to do more than just clasp my hands and utter thanks with my lips. If I really want to be biblical, I should sacrifice something.

So today in Union Square, I put some olives and dates on a platform of stones and left them there as an offering to God. I said a prayer and walked away. I don't know what I was hoping for--a vision, a pillar of fire--but whatever it was, I didn't get it. Instead I felt like I'd just spent $15.46 at the grocery store contributing to New York's rat problem.

It was a letdown, especially after my previous experience with sacrifice. That one was profound, enlightening, and deeply disturbing.

Let me rewind a few months.

When I first read the Bible, it became clear that sacrifice isn't a weird footnote in the Hebrew Scriptures--it's central to it. The biblical rules for sacrifice go on for pages and are staggeringly complex. I've since read them dozens of times and still don't have a handle on them.

I have, however, figured out three things:

1. Animal sacrifice is preferable to other types of sacrifice, including fruit, grain, and incense sacrifices, which are seen as B-level offerings.

2. The ancient Israelites sacrificed an impressively wide range of species: oxen, she-goats, he-goats, turtledoves, rams, lambs, and so on.

3. They sacrificed often, very often. Sins, death, birth, holidays--all required sacrifices at the Temple. After reading the sacrifice section of the Bible, you start to wonder how there was any time left to reap or sow or beget or anything else ancient Israelites had to do.

Luckily for me--and more luckily for the animals--practically no Bible followers sacrifice animals anymore. Sacrifices were allowed only at the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E. So maybe that's my loophole. Perfectly understandable.

And yet, animal sacrifice is such a huge part of the Bible, I feel I have to experience it somehow. Which won't be easy. Being a city boy, I've never killed anything larger than a water bug.

Over lunch one day, my adviser, the history teacher Eddy Portnoy, told me that there is still one ritual that borders on animal sacrifice. The ritual is called kaparot, and it's practiced by some ultra-Orthodox Jews once a year--on the night before Yom Kippur. The idea is that you buy a live chicken, hold it over your head, say a blessing, and have the bird slaughtered in front of you. The chicken is then donated to the poor.

Kaparot is not in the Bible. The earliest mentions of the ritual are in ninth-century literature from what is now Iraq. But it's the closest thing I'll find to legal sacrifice in the tristate area, so on a drizzly night back in October, I hop the subway to Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

I know I am getting close by the smell. As I walk from the subway station, the smell segues from the traditional New York City garbageand-car-exhaust odor to a startling Arkansas-poultry-farm odor.

I arrive a few blocks later. I'll say this: There wasn't much of a chance I'd walk by without noticing. Hundreds of Orthodox Jews mill around in their black hats and long black coats and prayer books, all soggy from the light drizzle.

The black hats are outnumbered only by chickens. Chickens in cages, chickens on the street, chickens tucked under arms. It could be a Lithuanian town in 1805--minus the ever-present cell phones and digital cameras.

My guide is Rabbi Epstein, a round-faced Hasid originally from Tennessee. We meet on a predetermined corner.

We start by talking about our beards--common ground.

"Do you do any trimming?" I ask.

"No trimming allowed," Epstein says.

"But you can try to clean it up a bit," says his friend, another rabbi. With that, the other rabbi grabs his beard and does a quick roll-andtuck-under-the-chin. Real sleight of hand, Ricky Jay stuff. But it makes his beard a half foot shorter.

The atmosphere is oddly festive, like a Jewish Mardi Gras. We have to talk loudly to be heard over the clucking and squawking and flapping. And just in case the scene needed to be more surreal, Rabbi Epstein has a noticeable Southern accent, so his Hebrew words are filtered through a Garth Brooks twang.

I ask about the sacrifice part of the ritual.

"Kaparot is definitely not a sacrifice," says Epstein kindly but firmly. "You can only sacrifice at the Temple, and the Temple does not exist anymore."

"How is it different?"

"The chicken does not die for our sins. It reminds us what could or should be happening to us because we are sinners."

"But isn't it in the same ballpark as the original scapegoat?" I ask.

I was referring to an ancient biblical ritual in which, on Yom Kippur, the Israelites transferred their sins to a goat and ran it over a cliff. It's the origin of the word scapegoat.

"Maybe," he says reluctantly. "But it's very different. The sins aren't in the chicken. It's to arouse within us the knowledge that 'there but for the grace of God go I.'"

I try to keep an open mind, but I am having trouble.

"I've gotta tell you," I say. "I feel bad for these chickens."

Epstein shakes his head. "No, it's kosher slaughter. These butchers use the sharpest knives. It's like a paper cut. You know how paper cuts don't hurt for a while after you get them? This doesn't hurt."

The crowd is thick. Kids with boxes ask for donations for charity. Friends snap photos of one another holding up fluttering chickens. We bump into Rabbi Shmuley Boteach--he's the third most famous Orthodox Jew, right after Joe Lieberman and reggae rocker Matisyahu. Boteach wrote the book Kosher Sex and, for a brief moment, was Michael Jackson's spiritual adviser. Boteach has a Treo clipped to his belt, a show in development on The Learning Channel (which has since aired), and is alarmingly media savvy.

"We've had documentary crews here before. And if you show this alone, out of context, it seems barbaric and irrational."

Rabbi Boteach is right. I know I'll be committing the same sin. Since I can't devote my entire book to explaining ultra-Orthodox rituals, kaparot will, by necessity, seem out of context.

"Is it any more irrational than a lot of things in our culture?" he asks. "Is it more irrational than Botox? Or more irrational than transubstantiation?"

Again, maybe he's got a point: In my admittedly brief encounters with the Hasidim, I've found them to be a lot more reasonable than I imagined. The ones I've met have been, for the most part, bright and friendly. And they have a fascinating self-awareness. Early on, Rabbi Epstein told me he took his kids to Colonial Williamsburg. One of his kids asked him, "Do people still live like this?"

And Rabbi Epstein told him, "No one lives like they did in the eighteenth century. Well, except for in Crown Heights."

So they aren't wackjobs. Well, let me qualify that. Most of them aren't wackjobs. There are exceptions.

Case in point: the short Hasidic Jew wandering among the chickens with a sandwich board over his black coat. The sandwich board has a huge photo of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the Lubavitchers, the huge Brooklyn-based Hasidic movement.

"The rebbe is coming soon!" he says with an Israeli accent.

"I thought Rabbi Schneerson died a few years ago."

"Well, we interpret it as dying, but he's not dead. He's going to come back, and there will be the Messianic Age."

This guy had drunk the kosher Kool-Aid.

"What does that mean? What will the Messianic Age look like?" I ask.

"Money will grow on trees. And clothing will also grow on trees. And the sand will be like candy. Everything will be provided for, so all we have to do is study Torah all day."

What an amazingly detailed vision. I expected some vague generalizations, not beaches of Skittles and orchards of chinos. As for the activities, I already study the Bible all day, so this wasn't too enticing.

"Have you ever studied anything but religion?" I ask.

"I had a little math and science when I was a kid, but not much. When I'm done with religion, I'll study other topics." He smiles.

"But you'll never be done with religion, right?"

"I'm not done yet."

Man, do I hate that insular thinking. It makes me think of my distant ancestor, the rabbi named Vilna Gaon. He railed against that mind-set, saying an understanding of the Bible required a broad education, including, as the Britannica describes it, "the study of math, astronomy, geography, botany, and zoology."

I find Rabbi Epstein again. Enough procrastinating. It's time for me to actually do this ritual. I pay ten dollars to a man behind a table and am directed to the open back of a huge truck. It's packed with chickens fluttering in coops.

"One male," says Epstein. Men get male chickens, he explains, women get females, and pregnant women get one of each to cover all contingencies.

The truck guy hands me my chicken--white feathered, red beaked, very much alive.

"Hold it under the wings," says Epstein. He takes the chicken and demonstrates for me a full-nelson grip.

"Really? But--"

"It's comfortable for them, totally comfortable," he assures me. The chicken squawks. I stroke him to calm him down.

Now here's the thing: I know the rotisserie chicken I get at Boston Market did not die of natural causes. It did not drift off to eternal sleep in its old age surrounded by loved ones and grandchicks at a chicken hospice. It had its throat slit too. But modern society has done an excellent job of shielding me from this fact.

I look at my chicken again. Oh, man. I have an awful epiphany: The chicken kind of looks like Jasper--the same big eyes, same cocked head; it all but says "Da-da" (or actually, "A. J.").

You don't have to be Maimonides to see where this is going. I'm playing Abraham to the chicken's Isaac. And I don't have even a speck of Abraham's faith. I feel nauseated and loosen my grip. The chicken flaps out of my hands and starts scampering down the street. Epstein scampers after it, scoops it up, and brings it back to me. I stroke the chicken's head again.

"Now wave it in a circle over your head."

This is one of the strangest parts of the kaparot ritual--you are supposed to gently twirl the bird three times in the air.

Epstein is holding the prayer book for me to read: "This is my exchange," I say. "This is my substitute, this is my expiation. This chicken shall go to its death, and I shall proceed to a good, long life and peace." I was hoping I'd feel my sins flow out of me, but I don't. I'm too focused on holding the flapping chicken.

Next stop is the kosher slaughterers. There are three of them standing behind a counter on a raised platform, bringing to mind very violent pharmacists. They're wearing black garbage bags over their bodies to protect themselves from splattered blood. And, my goodness, is there blood--it coats the ground, it spots the faces, it soaks the gloves. The smell of chicken blood is so strong, a girl in line is dry heaving. In the era of avian flu, can this be a good idea?

I give my chicken to the slaughterer. He takes it, flips it over, bends back the neck, and makes three quick strokes with the knife. The chicken is dead, just like that.

The butcher tosses my chicken in an upside-down red Con Ed traffic cone, which is where it will stay as the blood drains out of its body. My chicken will then be plucked and packaged and trucked to a needy family somewhere in Brooklyn.

I'm elbowed out of the way. I'm still in my city-boy stupor: My chicken was alive; now, three knife strokes later, it's dead. Epstein is saying something, but I can't really focus. I'm too dazed.

As I said, I've started to look at life differently. When you're thanking God for every little joy--every meal, every time you wake up, every time you take a sip of water--you can't help but be more thankful for life itself, for the unlikely and miraculous fact that you exist at all.

What I mean is that I do admire the sentiment behind kaparot. I think it's good to be reminded that I could be scampering around the street one minute, and the next minute find myself gone from this world--that life is so absurdly precious and fleeting. And yet I don't admire the method. Perhaps if I grew up as a Hasid, it'd make more sense to me. But as Rabbi Boteach says, out of context, it just seems barbaric. If I ever do kaparot again, I'm going to do it like my Aunt Kate. Some Orthodox Jews, Kate included, practice a tamer--but still approved--version of kaparot: Instead of poultry, they wave money over their heads.

As I walk to the subway and the smell of chickens fades, I thank God that He discontinued the daily need for ritual slaughter. I had enough trouble with a chicken. I'd hate to try a goat or an ox.

And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes . . . you shall leave them for the poor --LEVITICUS 19:10

Day 135. Our living room table is covered with four large terra-cotta pots containing cucumber plants. Or at least scraggly, struggling versions of cucumber plants.

I've been trying to engage in some agriculture, seeing as so many biblical laws involve farming. I bought cucumber seeds online (cucumber was eaten by the Hebrews when they were slaves in Egypt, along with melons, leeks, and garlic) and planted them in soil. For good measure, I added a couple of dozen cinnamon-colored plant-food pellets that called to mind that discussion of rabbit digestion at the Creation Museum.

The cucumbers do grow--they each get to be the size of a Good & Plenty candy. And then they promptly die. I don't understand why. To date I've grown and killed about a hundred dozen tiny, prickly, inedible cucumbers.

My hope had been to leave cucumber "gleanings." The idea of gleanings is one of my favorites in the Bible. It goes like this: When you harvest your field, don't reap the entire field. Leave the corners unharvested so that the leftovers--the gleanings--can be gathered by the poor.

It's a beautiful and compassionate rule. Plus, the commandment rewards people for doing a half-assed job, which I think is a nice notion. Part of the idea is that, ultimately, the land belongs to God, so you respect that and be sure to provide for God's children. It's been called the first welfare system.

And it can lead to unexpected blessings. Consider this great, romantic story in the Old Testament's Book of Ruth: Ruth was an impoverished foreigner who had followed her mother-in-law Naomi to Israel. To survive, Ruth gathered gleanings of barley. One day the rich owner of the land--a man named Boaz--spotted Ruth gleaning and was smitten. When she found out about his crush, she bathed herself, anointed herself, put on her finest clothes, and sneaked into Boaz's room to "lie at his feet." (Some say the phrase is a euphemism for lying elsewhere.) Boaz was startled but pleased. They were soon married--and it all started because of the command to leave gleanings.

In any case, how to apply this amazing notion of gleaning to my life, since the cucumber experiment is flopping? I suppose that gleaning could be generalized to mean "give to the poor." But I'm already doing that, thanks to tithing and other commands. Gleaning is a slightly different creature.

I decide to try to figure out how to update it. Which is hard. If I do a lax job on an Esquire article, it doesn't help the poor. It just means a copy editor has to fill in Scarlett Johansson's age and unsplit my infinitives.

But then I have this idea: What's the closest thing to harvesting in my life? Going to an ATM. What if I leave twenty dollars in the machine whenever I take out two hundred? I do this twice, and it isn't bad. Though I get the queasy feeling that Ron Perelman is coming in after me, and that he's using my twenty-dollar bill as Kleenex.

So I came up with a new plan: if I accidentally drop anything valuable on the street, I'll leave it there. It would be God's will. I would not gather it up.

Perhaps I psyched myself out: For several days, I don't drop a thing, not even so much as a nickel or a clump of lint. But then, yesterday, I am pulling out my wallet on the corner of 81st and Columbus, and a crumpled five-dollar bill falls out. I glance at it for a second and keep walking.

"Excuse me, sir!"

I turn around. A woman is holding up my bill.

"You dropped this!"

"Uh, that's OK," I say.

"It's yours. I saw it drop out of your pocket," she says. I pause.

"No, it wasn't mine," I say, and keep walking. This lying has to

stop.

Praise the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings! --PSALMS 33:2

Day 138. My white garments have gotten a shade darker, thanks to food stains and general urban pollution. But I still love wearing them. They make me feel buoyant, like I'm floating a couple of feet above the sidewalk. They're such a success, I decide that I should have an even more biblical appearance, which is how I settle on following Psalms 33:2. This instructs us to praise the Lord on a harp of ten strings.

"Do ten-string harps even exist anymore?" I wondered. Or would I have to make my own? Maybe I'll gain worldwide acclaim as the only living ten-string harpist.

One Google search later, I discovered that I would not be the only ten-string harpist. Far from it. When will it sink into my skull that there is no such thing as an obscure Bible verse?

Turns out there's a thriving underground world devoted to the biblical instrument. You can buy ten-string harps on eBay. You can send a Christmas e-card featuring ten-string harp music (the harp is plucked by a computer-generated angel who looks like a winged, demure Victoria's Secret model). You can read about how the Messianic age will usher in ten-string harps that will miraculously expand the octave from eight notes to ten notes.

The Tiffany of ten-string harps is an Indiana-based shop called Jubilee Harps. (Motto: "Home is where your harp is!") The website features audio samples of harp music, a photo gallery, accessories such as amplifiers and charcoal gray harp cases, and promises of spiritual rewards: "Although not fully understood, people today are experiencing the healing powers of the harp. Just hold this harp close to your heart, rest your face on the side of its arm, and feel peace and serenity surround you."

I call to find out more. The co-owner, Mary Woods, gets on the phone; she tells me that she and her husband, Rick, have sold more than one thousand of their handmade wooden King David-inspired harps to clients in sixteen countries.

They set up shop soon after Rick was downsized from his job as a scientist at Bristol-Myers Squibb. He made his first harp for a celebration at their church.

"It was late one night," Mary recalls, "and Rick got me to come out to his workshop, and I looked at the harp, and I couldn't quit crying. He thought I was mad because he spent three months in the workshop, and all he had was this harp. But I went over and hugged it, and I couldn't quit crying."

At this point, two things happen: Mary starts choking up on the other end of the phone. And I start feeling like more of a voyeuristic schmuck than I have since this year began. Much has touched me in these months--the humility of the Amish, the joy of Hasidic dancing, the power of prayer--but I can't relate to Mary's passion for a biblical harp. It's totally foreign to me. I thank her and hang up.

In the end, I did buy a ten-string harp online--a $40 one from a secondhand store, not the $800 version offered by Jubilee. Mine is made of coffee-colored wood and is about the size of a cafeteria tray. I play it twice a day, as instructed by the Psalms. I don't really know what I'm doing, but the good news is, it's hard to screw up too badly on a harp. A pluck here, a glissando there, and it sounds soothing.

I sometimes take it out for walks, which mostly inspires the cautious sideways glances I've become so accustomed to. I have had a couple of notable reactions, though. When I strummed my harp during a recent stroll on Columbus Avenue, a woman walking her dog offered me a dollar. Also, 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.

In the end, though, the harp isn't transporting me. I'm going to have to find another PIN code to spiritual transcendence.

These are the living things which you may eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.

--LEVITICUS 11:2

Day 140. The Bible is filled with so many Thou Shalt Nots that I've started to take advantage of anything the Bible does allow. Even if said allowed activity isn't so alluring. Which is how, today, I ended up eating a bug.

To start at the beginning: Before this project, I'd had just a little exposure to the Bible's food laws. When I was in college, 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. Frankly, I found the meals no tastier than the airline's secular lasagna. So I stopped doing that. Which is probably good, since feigning piety to upgrade your lunch is ethically dubious.

My airline adventure wasn't a total waste, though. I did pick up the very basics of the Bible's dietary restrictions. Namely these rules, found in Leviticus:

* You shall eat no pork or bacon or any other pig meat (land creatures must have cloven hoofs and chew their cud to be edible).

* No shellfish (sea creatures must have both fins and scales to be edible; shrimp, clams, and their cousins have neither).

* No blood.

* No rabbits.

* Certain birds--most of them birds of prey, such as eagles, vultures, and falcons--are off-limits.

Why the food taboos? The Bible itself doesn't give a reason. I'd always thought they developed as a primitive way to avoid trichinosis and other nasty diseases. But apparently I was wrong. Most anthropologists now dismiss that idea. The more popular theory nowadays is that the food bans were all about creating holiness and separation. The Israelites wanted to keep themselves apart from other tribes such as the pork-loving Philistines. They were marking their territory with menus.

Observant Jews follow the Bible's laws today. In fact, they follow a far more elaborate version of the laws, a system recorded by the rabbis over the centuries. The strictest kosher eater abides by hundreds of other rules, including regulations about separating milk and meat that could take years to learn.

A handful of Christians keep the basic rules, including the evangelical author of a book I own called The Maker's Diet, who writes: "In an odd twist of logic, many religious Americans dismiss the Jewish dietary laws as outdated legalism, invalid for the modern era. Yet they embrace the fundamental truths of the Ten Commandments as universal and timeless." This guy's in the minority. Most Christians believe that Jesus's sacrifice freed Christians from the food laws.

Over the last few months, I've been trying to abide by the rules explicitly listed in the Bible (as opposed to the full rabbinical kosher laws). It's been an enormous challenge.

Granted, in some sense, I've gotten lucky. The laws align with my own preferences. I've never liked shellfish. Lobsters, for instance, remind me too much of something you'd kill with Raid. So it wasn't a hardship to give up the ocean's bottom-feeders. I don't eat much bacon, either; my cholesterol already hovers around the score of a professional bowler, and I don't need it to break 300.

The problem is, forbidden foods are hiding everywhere. Bacon lurks in salad dressings. Gelatin is sometimes derived from pig bones, so an argument can be made--and often is--that it's forbidden. And pig fat. That terrifies me. Typical is this recent exchange I had with a waitress at a midtown restaurant:

"Do you know if the piecrust is made with lard?"

"I don't think so, but I'll check."

"Thanks. I can't eat lard."

"Allergies?"

"No, Leviticus."

It's a conversation stopper, that one. It's hard to trot out the Bible at

a New York restaurant without sounding self-righteous or messianic. But the Proverbs say I must tell the truth, so I told the truth.

It's often pointed out that following religious food laws sharpens your discipline. The famous twelfth-century philosopher Maimonides says this is precisely their purpose: "[They] train us to master our appetites; to accustom us to restrain our desires; and to avoid considering the pleasure of eating and drinking as the goal of man's existence."

The thing is, I've been mastering my appetites since my cholesterol first bubbled up in my early twenties. For years, I've been eating Styrofoam-like fat-free cheese and scouring ingredient labels for the evil hydrogenated oil. It seems most people nowadays have some sort of food restriction, whether it's avoiding carbs, sugar, or nonorganic vegetables. My friend's sister refuses to eat nightshades, whatever they are.

So if self-regulation of our urges is the purpose, perhaps the Bible laws are no longer necessary. As a society, we've outgrown them. I told this idea to my Orthodox adviser Yossi. He shook his head. "You can't know the mind of God," he said. "There may be benefits beyond what we know now or can imagine."

So I sucked it up and stuck with the laws, still hoping to trip over one of those elusive benefits. And maybe I did. It happened about three weeks ago. I was following one of the most obscure food taboos in the Bible. This one concerns forbidden fruit. According to Leviticus 19:23- 25, you cannot eat fruit unless the tree that bears said fruit is at least five years old. If a tree is four years old or younger, its fruit is not for human consumption. (Some Orthodox Jews follow this but say it applies only to fruit grown in Israel or fruit grown with your own hands.)

I tried to find out the ages of all the fruits I ate by emailing and calling grocery stores and companies. This was not a success. I got a lot of terse responses like this one, from the corporate headquarters of Polaner All-Fruit spreads:

Mr. Jacobs,

Unfortunately there would not be any way for us to guarantee the age of the plants from which our suppliers pick the blackberries.

I was reduced to researching which kinds of fruits came from slow-bearing trees and which from fast-bearing. I learned that peach trees can bear fruit in two years. Too dangerous. Pear trees in four. Again, too risky. But cherry trees, those are slowpokes. They take at least five to seven from planting to produce.

Cherries are safe. Not my favorite fruit, but they will be my fruit for the year. I went to Fairway supermarket, bought a half pound and began eating them out of the plastic bag on the walk home, spitting the seeds into garbage cans on the street corners.

Each cherry took about three seconds to eat. Three seconds to eat, but at least five years in the making. It seemed unfair to the hard-working cherry tree. The least I could do was to devote my attention to the cherry in those three seconds, really appreciate the tartness of the skin and the faint crunching sound when I bite down. I guess it's called mindfulness. Or being in the moment, or making the mundane sacred. Whatever it is, I'm doing it more. Like the ridiculously extended thank-you list for my hummus, the fruit taboo made me more aware of the whole cherry process, the seed, the soil, the five years of watering and waiting. 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.

Of them you may eat: the locust according to its kind . . . --LEVITICUS 11:22

But anyway, back to the bugs. To really connect with my forefathers through my stomach, I decided the food taboos were only half the story. I'd have to do more. I'd have to eat the same foods Moses and Jesus did.

To help me with this, I bought the aforementioned The Maker's Diet, a 320-page book by an evangelical nutritionist named Jordan Rubin. It's a helpful guide. The basic idea is a modified Mediterranean diet, which means our refrigerator is now packed with even more hummus, tahini, and pita bread. At the suggestion of The Maker's Diet, I've also cut out all cow's milk. Cows in biblical times were mainly used for dragging farm implements. The beverage of choice for Israelites was goat's or sheep's milk.

I called around, and, sure enough, I found a health food store in midtown that stocks fresh goat's milk from upstate New York. They stash a few half-gallon cartons in the fridge behind the massive display of vitamin B and echinacea.

Every morning I splash a little goat's milk on my oatmeal. It's not bad, really. It's like regular milk but thicker, the consistency of those overpriced blackberry Odwalla smoothies.

Also, I'm eating a lot of honey. Honey is one of the few certain pleasures in the Bible. It's the very description of the Promised Land--a place God says is "flowing with milk and honey"--so my oatmeal gets a healthy dollop of honey.

(My aunt Marti, the vegan and animal rights activist, found out about my honey eating and sent me a rebuking email. The subject header was "The bitter truth about honey." She listed all the ways the commercial honey industry mistreats bees. I won't reprint it here, but her description of artificial bee insemination was disturbingly graphic. She signed the note, "Your eccentric aunt Marti.")

The Mediterranean cuisine is working out well. Maybe it's buried deep somewhere in my DNA, this love of chickpeas and flat bread. It's my kind of Semitic food. Incidentally, I can't stand that other Jewish food: the Eastern European variety. I don't know why--a shrink would probably say it's because I have conflicted feelings about Judaism in general--but I can't eat it. The single most nauseating meal I've ever had was at a Lower East Side Jewish restaurant called Sammy's Roumanian Steak House. This is a place where, instead of salt and pepper, the condiment of choice is liquefied chicken fat. They put a big bottle of thick yellow chicken fat--schmaltz is the official term--smack in the middle of the table, just in case your potato pancakes aren't quite sopping wet enough with grease already. I ate at Sammy's with a guy who, after a couple of vodkas, mistook the chicken fat for a complimentary bottle of orange juice, and downed several gulps before turning white and excusing himself for the bathroom.

Where was I? Oh yes, the bugs. Now, this doesn't get much play in The Maker's Diet, but there was one other source of protein in biblical times: insects. Leviticus forbade the ancients from indiscriminate bug eating, condemning most insects as "abominations" (anything that creeps, swarms, or has four legs and wings is off limits). So, no beetles, no mosquitoes, no bees, and so on.

But there are exceptions: "Of [insects] you may eat: the locust according to its kind, the bald locust according to its kind, the cricket according to its kind, and the grasshopper according to its kind." (Leviticus 11:22) In other words, locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers are fine.

It's not clear from the Bible how often our forefathers actually ate them. Were they a popular meal? Or just in case of famine? The Bible's only other reference to bug consumption comes in the story of John the Baptist, who was reported to have survived on locusts and wild honey (though even this is controversial; some say the word locust here is a mistranslation, and he really ate carob pods).

Regardless, since the Bible diet contains so many restrictions, I figured I'd try to take advantage of this loophole. Maybe it'll make me feel manly and adventurous. It'll be Fear Factor, Old Testament style.

It isn't hard to find the bugs. The internet is teeming with edible insects, or "microlivestock," as they are called. There are chocolate wafers with ants sprinkled in. And beetle toffee bars. And larva cheddar cheese snacks. And plenty of crickets, which are apparently called "the other green meat" (high in protein, low in fat). The most promising supplier is named Fluker's Farms, which describes its crickets as "oven roasted to perfection and then covered with the finest chocolate available to create one truly unforgettable exotic snack." Plus, you get an "exclusive" I Ate a Bug Club button.

A few days later, I get a purple box with two dozen individually wrapped chocolate crickets. I'm going to need a fellow traveler on this one. I ask Julie, but she gives me another in a long line of overly enthusiastic "Thanks for asking! But I'm going to take a pass this time!"

So I take a couple of crickets along to dinner with my friend John. For my last book, John went to singles bars and tried to pick up women using facts from the encyclopedia about penguin mating rituals, so I figure he might be willing. He wasn't so sure.

"If I feel sick in the next couple of days, I'm going to blame you." "Fair enough," I said.

"I'll think about it."

After we finish dinner at a downtown diner, I eat my cricket. Or at

least I swallow it. I pop the cricket in my mouth, bite down twice, then chug water, ingesting it like a chestnut-sized pill. I tasted nothing. I offer the other one to John.

"Come on. Just one."

"Fine," he says.

John unwraps his cricket and takes a bite, chewing slowly while looking at the ceiling, brow furrowed in thought.

"You like it?"

"A little crunchy," he says. "Hard to actually taste the cricket."

"I read it's supposed to be tangy. Is it tangy?"

"The chocolate is overpowering. But you do get a nice crispness."

He takes in the other half.

"It tastes like that candy bar Krackel. Same consistency."

A couple of days later, I am at my grandfather's house boasting about my insect eating. My cousin Rick, who is a high-school sophomore, isn't impressed.

"You eat insects all the time," he says. "There are insect parts in everything."

Rick has embraced entomology with a passion that most kids reserve for baseball and illegally downloaded music. If E. O. Wilson had a poster, Rick would have it on his wall. So presumably he knew what he was talking about.

And he did. 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.

So I was violating the Bible rules even without intending to. Or maybe not. Depends on the interpretation. Orthodox Jews usually reason that since they didn't have microscopes in biblical times, then a bug must be visible with bare eyes to be forbidden.

Why would God weigh in on any insects at all, visible or not? Once again, my secular mind wanted to know the reason for the Lord's decrees. What's the logic? The Bible doesn't say--it's one of the unexplained laws.

But one book I read--The Unauthorized Version by Robin Lane Fox--had a theory. It said that in biblical times, swarming locusts would often devour the crops and cause famines. The only way for the poor to survive was by eating the locusts themselves. So if the Bible didn't approve of locust eating, the poorest Israelites would have died of starvation. This I like. More and more, I feel it's important to look at the Bible with an open heart. If you roll up your sleeves, even the oddest passages--and the one about edible bugs qualifies--can be seen as a sign of God's mercy and compassion.

You shall rise up before the grayheaded and honor the aged . . . --LEVITICUS 19:32 (NASB)

Day 142. I'm currently in Florida. Julie and I have made a trip to Boca Raton for the wedding of Julie's college friend. We got through airport security without a second glance, which made me both happy and slightly concerned about the screeners' vigilance.

It's the day before the ceremony, and we're at a strip mall restaurant. It's 5:00 p.m., Jasper's mealtime. Florida, 5:00 p.m. dinner. As you can imagine, the average age approached that of a Genesis patriarch--maybe not Methuselah's 969 years, but perhaps Mahalalel, who saw 895 years.

The Bible has a lot to say about your elders. In fact, there's this one law that I keep meaning to abide by, but so far it has gotten lost in the avalanche of other rules. It is Leviticus 19:32: We should not only respect our elders, but stand in their presence. If there's a time to laser in on this rule, it is now. So as we wait for our pasta, I start standing up and sitting down. I pop up every time a gray-haired person enters the restaurant. Which is pretty much every forty-five seconds. It looks like I'm playing a solitaire version of musical chairs.

"What are you doing?" asks Julie.

I tell her about Leviticus 19.

"It's very distracting."

I stand up and sit down.

"I thought you had a wedgie," Julie says.

I stand up and sit down.

"Are you going to do this for the rest of the year?"

"I'm going to try," I say. I know I'll fail--there's just too much to

remember to follow in biblical living--but I don't want to admit that yet.

There's a reason the Bible commands us to respect the elderly. According to scholars, many of the ancient Israelites lived a subsistencelevel nomadic life, and the elderly--who couldn't do much heavy lifting--were seen as a liability.

The command seems disturbingly relevant today. After the ancient times, the elderly did have a few good centuries there. Victorian society especially seemed to respect those with white hair and jowls. But now, we've reverted back to the elderly-as-liability model of biblical times. This has become increasingly troublesome to me as I speed toward old age myself. I'm thirty-eight, which means I'm a few years from my first angioplasty, but--at least in the media business--I'm considered a doddering old man. I just hope the twenty-six-year-old editors out there have mercy on me.

And I have pledged to have mercy on those even older than I. A week ago, when I volunteered at the soup kitchen, I sat next to this fellow volunteer; she must have been in her seventies. And she complained . . . for a half hour straight. She was like the Fidel Castro of complainers--she spouted a never-ending stream of faultfinding. She spent five minutes alone on how the tree roots in her neighborhood make the sidewalk uneven. But instead of trying to stuff my ears, I attempted to empathize. Yes, that must be hard. Uneven sidewalks. I never noticed it, but, yes, someone could trip.

As Julie and I finish our dinner, we watch an old man get up from his table and shuffle off to the bathroom. He emerges a few minutes later and sits down at an empty table. It is a table two tables away from the table with his wife and kids. He sits there alone for several minutes, his head cocked, staring into the middle distance. What's going on? Is he mad at his family? I didn't see them fighting. Why his banishment?

Suddenly the daughter notices her father sitting two tables away.

"Dad!" she calls. "We're over here. Over here!" He looks over, suddenly remembering. He returns to the table, still somewhat dazed.

I turn to Julie. She looks like she's about to cry.

"The standing stuff I could do without. But I think it's good that you're honoring your elders. That's a good thing."

Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you. --PROVERBS 4:25

Day 143. My glasses broke today. Jasper grabbed the wire-rimmed frames and stretched out the temples, so the glasses keep slipping off my nose. I'm reduced to keeping my head tilted up at a forty-five-degree angle as we walk around Boca Raton. My neck is killing me.

Plus, I look arrogant; my nose stuck in the air all day. I wonder if I'm breaking a biblical rule. I'm not sure. Maybe. In the Talmud, there's a ban against walking more than four cubits in what one translator calls "a jaunty, insolent, upright position." This is one reason you see some old Jewish men and women walk with such a pronounced stoop, their hands folded behind their backs. In America, land of Trump and self-esteem, humility isn't much of a virtue. But my ancestors wouldn't even stand up straight for fear of looking boastful.

I keep my chin in the air while watching the wedding the next day. It's a lovely, quiet outdoor ceremony in a Japanese-style garden. You can barely hear the bride and groom, but it doesn't matter.

I try not to think about the propolygamy parts of the Bible. That would be disrespectful to the event at hand. I try to focus instead on those parts of the Bible that say one wife per husband is a good ratio. In Genesis 2:24--a passage quoted by Jesus--we read about how man and woman are not complete until they cleave to each other. They are two halves. Only together can they create a full being.

So you shall do with any lost thing of your brother's, which he loses and you find.

--DEUTERONOMY 22:3

Day 148. On the flight back from Florida, I found the checkbook of a Fort Lauderdale woman in the seat pocket in front of me. The Bible says that if your neighbor loses an ox or a sheep--or anything, for that matter--you are to return it to him or her.

So I sent back the checkbook. I felt good, honorable. I'm not a hardhearted New Yorker: I'm acting with random kindness. And the beauty part is, it actually worked out to my benefit. The Fort Lauderdale woman sent me a thank-you note (the stationary had a cartoon of a fat guy wearing an "I'm Too Sexy for My T-shirt" T-shirt), and enclosed a Starbucks gift card.

The checkbook triumph gives me such a moral high, I use the card to pay for the latte of the guy behind me at Starbucks. I got the idea from a religious website devoted to kindness. Just tell the cashier that three bucks of the next guy's bill is on you.

I'm opening the door to leave, when I hear him call.

"'Scuse me," he says. He is about forty, squat, wearing biking shorts despite the chilly weather.

I turn around.

"Did you pay for my coffee?"

"Yes, I did."

"I really don't feel comfortable with that."

I pause. Huh. I don't know what to do here. Does he think there must be a catch? Does he think I was hitting on him?

"Uh . . ." I say. Then I walk out the door very quickly and don't look back till I am a block away.

Ye shall not round the corners of your heads. --LEVITICUS 19:27 (KJV)

Day 153. A physical update on my/Jacob's appearance: The beard has gone wild. You can see only about 40 percent of my face nowadays. It's got its disadvantages, of course--my wife now will kiss me only after covering her face with her hands so that just her lips are exposed. But I try to look on the bright side. It's keeping me warm from the wintry New York winds, like a sweater for my cheeks. Plus, it's providing me a level of anonymity. Not that I've ever been mobbed on a subway platform by adoring fans. But if I happen to see my former boss on the street, it's nice to know I could stroll by unrecognized.

I've even started to get the occasional positive comment about my looks. The Italian woman who works at the corner deli said she feels more sacred in my presence and is afraid to curse or gossip. And my coworker Tom, whom I hadn't seen in months, said he was all ready to greet me with a one-liner about Mel Gibson's facial hair, then decided he couldn't make a joke because he felt almost reverential. Reverential, that's the word he used. I was on a high for two days afterward.