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(“If there is a God, why would he allow war, disease and my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Alone, Jacobs can ponder the big questions, but he usually turns them into a joke. You need a community, not some stranger rabbis who drop by once in a while. The truly Orthodox would say you can’t do this alone, in your apartment, with your wife rolling her eyes. But otherwise he skirts around the edges. Jacobs comes closest to transcendence in a crowd of Hasidic men dancing ecstatically all night. Jacobs has dinner with him, and leaves with the impression that Gil is “subtly dangerous.” He careered, Jacobs tells us, from acid head to Hindu to cult leader to born-again Christian to ultra-Orthodox Jew who gathers in the lost souls of Jerusalem. Gil, too, started out as a secular Jew on a spiritual mission. Gil is the person Jacobs fears he could become if he really took the project to heart. Berkowitz, the guy who comes over to check for shatnez, or mixed fibers or his Uncle Gil, the inspiration for Jacobs’s project. So Jacobs’s most lively interactions by far are not with red-state America but with his own people: Mr. This is a New Testament nation, but most of the rules that make for good comedy are in the other book. When the friend suggests they get their kids together sometime for a play date, he tells the friend he’ll “take a pass” because he doesn’t “really want new friends right now.” His wife, of course, wants to kill him. He and his wife run into an old college acquaintance of hers at a restaurant. He refuses to tell his son that an English muffin is a form of bagel, prompting a massive temper tantrum. His efforts to obey the injunction against lying are an endless source of sit-com moments. He grows a beard of ZZ Top-like proportions. He contemplates taking his cute nanny as his second wife. He accepts a hug from a homeless woman on the subway, who then accuses him of harassing her. The result is that he ends up sort of like Kramer on “Seinfeld,” a big weirdo who interrupts the normal patter of urban life. Instead he lives out the biblical high life in his usual New York surroundings, among all his wanton, gossiping, blaspheming journalist friends.
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Unlike Norah Vincent (who wrote a book about passing as a man) and Eddie Murphy (who made himself over as a white man in a classic “Saturday Night Live” skit), Jacobs does not take the undercover spy route. In “The Year of Living Biblically,” he attends to the soul, turning himself from a guy who is “Jewish in the way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant” into a follower of “the ultimate biblical life.” This means spending a year strictly following a typed list of more than 700 biblical rules, including the obscure (don’t wear garments of mixed fibers, bind money to your hand, pay the wages of your workers every day) and the potentially awkward (don’t touch your wife seven days after her “discharge of blood,” bathe after sex and don’t tell lies, in their many variations). In his last book, “The Know-It-All,” Jacobs read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in an attempt to make himself smarter than his showoff brother-in-law. Jacobs is a stunt journalist, although that term seems belittling to the monumental self-improvement projects he subjects himself to. I would have to admit that every once in a while, as he wrote about walking down some New York street in a shepherd’s robe strumming his 10-string harp, or throwing small stones at a random suspected sinner, or eating crickets or burning myrrh each morning, I thought to myself, What’s the point, really?īut having a point is slightly beside the point.
THE BOOK THE LIVING BIBLE MOVIE
I would have to confess my jealousy that Jacobs already had a movie contract in place before the book had even been published, and that even though I have spent much more time around young-earth creationists than he has, he thought of a much funnier way to describe them (people who believe in an earth that’s “barely older than Gene Hackman”). I would have to strive to be as generous as possible, and point out right at the outset that this book is an inspired idea and that Jacobs is alarmingly adept at keeping the joke alive for 365 days. Jacobs is a fellow journalist and thus a neighbor of sorts. If I were to write this review while trying to live biblically, here are some of the rules I would have to follow: