Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part series about a week of living biblically. The second half will run next Tuesday.
Journalist A. J. Jacobs lived biblically for an entire year, and I could barely make it through one week.
In his 2007 book, The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs, a secular Jew, sets out to follow the Bible - Old and New Testaments - as literally as possible for one year. On The Year of Living Biblically Web site, Jacobs says his book is about his quest to live the ultimate biblical life. To follow every single rule in the Bible - as literally as possible.
Intrigued by the idea of such an involved project, I set out to try it myself. Well, I set out to try a scaled down version. As a woman, the idea of living biblically has vastly different implications than it does for a man given the cultural restrictions of women at the time. My version of living Biblically was to attempt to follow the Ten Commandments, the laws given to Moses on Mount Sinai, as closely as possible for one week.
The Ten Commandments are the basis of Judeo-Christian morality. In the Bible, they were given to Moses by God as a guideline for Israel, the Jews. Every time I transgressed a commandment, I sacrificed a lamb. Not a real lamb, of course. PETA would have none of that. I cut out paper lambs in preparation for my biblical week. For each transgression, I took one out of the stack. At the end of the week, I'd see how many lambs I sacrificed.
From the start of Day One, I quickly recognized which commandment would be the toughest for me to follow: eight. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Within a few hours of waking up, I was running late to meet a friend for lunch. She called wondering where I was. I'm on my way. Lie. I hadn't even left my house yet. One lamb down. I saw a Jim Carrey-esque week stretch out in front of me; one where I would be morally obligated to answer everyone truthfully, even when the truth would be much less flattering. I stumbled over the eighth commandment again when I realized that the simplest greeting was a temptation to lie. How are you? a classmate asked me. Good. How are you? My thoughtless answer to that question came out before I realized it, too, was a lie. I was actually having a really crappy day. The whole Ten Commandments thing was causing high anxiety, and I was overanalyzing my every action out of fear that I would transgress and lose a lamb.
You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image - 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. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Commandments one and two seemed simple enough. It's not like I've built any totem poles lately, and I definitely believe that God exists. No problems there. Number three, well not that I say it that much, but this week I had to purge the expression Oh God ... from my vocabulary entirely. This resulted in slower, hesitant talking for the first few days, until I got the hang of things.
'Remember the Sabbath day
to keep it holy. Commandment four is interpreted differently between Jews and Christians. Jews consider Saturday the Sabbath, while Christians celebrate it on Sunday. For the sake of my experience (and admittedly, in part because my column deadline is Sunday), I decided to follow the Jewish tradition of a Saturday Sabbath. Ultra Orthodox Jews take the ban from work pretty seriously. Jacobs writes in his book about his Orthodox family members who wouldn't even open the freezer door on Saturday, considering it work.
The frenzied, over-committed part of me was really nervous to waste an entire day, yet at the same time eager to get to this commandment. A day with no work sounded really appealing. This high was short-lived when I realized that not working would probably include not checking e-mails (I'm a self-professed Gmail addict), not cooking, not even cleaning up my room. There was no doubt that the Sabbath included not driving, too. Having grown up in a Cleveland suburb, I was already familiar with this form of honoring the Sabbath. I remember seeing the sidewalks of Cleveland Heights full of Orthodox Jews walking to Temple. But the idea of not being able to drive was daunting. This particular weekend, I went with some friends to Canter's Cave. Luckily (though I'm pretty sure the Biblical Jews frowned upon the idea of luck), that eliminated the driving dilemma.
Five commandments down, five to go and my stack of lambs is slimming. A few days of literalism and I'm talking less and thinking twice as much. I've got a list of commandments taped to my planner that even showed up in my dream. Like Jacobs, I've begun to wrap my mind around the implications of a life of biblical literalism, and the task is as steep as Mount Sinai itself.
Leah Hitchens is a junior studying
journalism. Send her an e-mail at
lh303105@ohiou.edu.
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Opinion
Leah Hitchens
