So you've devoted an entire year to reading the Encyclopedia Britannica in its entirety and writing about the experience. What do you do for an encore? Sticking with the book theme, it seems almost natural to turn your attention to the most important book ever written. So it is that A.J. Jacob devotes another full year of his life to the Bible - not only does he set out to read the Good Book, he makes plans to follow its teachings as literally as possible. Raised in a secular Jewish family, he is curious to know if his year of living biblically will change him into a religious person. In my opinion, however, what he describes in this book is an intellectual journey, not a spiritual one.
Jacobs goes all out, trying to follow even the most obscure laws and prescriptions he can find in the Bible. It's a lot more work than just following the Ten Commandments. He chooses to follow the Old Testament for the first eight months, then devote the last four months to the New Testament. Apart from his own reading and research, he calls upon a number of different religious figures to help him understand all of the teachings and rituals. He grows a beard, takes to wearing white clothes consisting of no mixed fibers, blows a ram's horn at the start of each month, attaches fringes to his garments, paints words of scripture around his door frame, performs many more little rituals that have no real significance for him at all, etc. It causes many a hardship to him and his family (a wife, a two-year-old son, and as the months pass, a set of twins on the way) - especially his long-suffering wife (being treated as unclean the week following Aunt Flo's monthly visit is not too popular with the women these days, for example). Over the course of the year, he has a number of unique experiences, travels to Israel, and seeks out guidance from both liberal and conservative followers of Judaism and Christianity. He learns a lot about himself in the process, but the key question is whether or not he will emerge from this grand experiment a changed man.
Inevitably, one's views of this book will greatly depend upon one's own religious beliefs. Atheists and agnostics will probably delight in all of the crazy Old Testament instructions he follows, while Jews and Christians will have their own interpretations, running the gamut from liberalism to fundamentalism. As a fundamentalist Southern Baptist (one religious affiliation Jacobs did not consult), it bothers me that Jacobs and many other individuals paint religious conservatism with such a wide brush of pre-judgment. We're not monsters; we just happen to interpret the Bible literally rather than picking and choosing the things we find convenient for our lifestyles and habits. We're slandered for believing we alone are right in our beliefs, yet that faith is what defines us. I don't believe Jacobs was completely open-minded in his approach, having to some degree prejudged Christian fundamentalists from the start.
From my perspective, if Jacobs really wanted to find God, he went about it exactly the wrong way. He can follow every rule he finds in the Bible, but it avails him nothing in the end because he never really seeks a personal connection with God, even in his approach to prayer. That is why I do not consider his journey to be a spiritual one at all. Jacobs doesn't even attend church on a weekly basis, although he does spend time with a number of different religious groups and leaders. Furthermore, his four months spent following the New Testament are nowhere near as intensive as the eight months he spent immersed in the Old Testament. In modern terms, Jesus makes little more than a cameo appearance in these pages, and the heart of the Gospel message itself is rather neglected.
The Year of Living Biblically is certainly interesting and entertaining, but I do not consider it very enlightening. Jacobs does gain some understanding of the religious experiences and beliefs of several groups of believers (some of which surprise him), but he never makes an effort to approach God in a personal, soul-searching way. Instead, he adopts this technical image of a Biblical lifestyle, a decidedly outward approach, and periodically wonders if it is working any changes in his internal, spiritual life. On the whole, I find the whole thing little more than a sociology project, dealing primarily with the reactions of friends, family, and strangers to his project and, in turn, his reactions to their reactions. Jacobs learns a lot about himself over the course of the year, but I do not think he succeeded in finding anything remotely profound. |
home
