Tuesday, April 20, 2010
AJ Jacobs: My year of living biblically
AN agnostic attempts to follow Sacred Law.
Very interesting for a Believer, because of the interesting & unexpected insights. Seems well worth reading.
excerpt from his website:
"THE RULES
At the beginning of the year, I wrote down every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, every nugget of advice I could find in the Bible. It's a very long list. It runs 72 pages. More than 700 rules.
Some rules were wise, some completely baffling. Some were baffling at first, then wise. Some were wise first then baffling. Here, some of the highlights, broken down by category.
MOST UNEXPECTEDLY WISE AND LIFE-ENHANCING RULES
* Keep the sabbath. As a workaholic (I check my emails in the middle of movies), I learned the beauty of an enforced pause in the week. No cell phones, no messages, no thinking about deadlines. It was a bizarre and glorious feeling. As one famous rabbi called it, the sabbath is a "sanctuary in time."
* "Let your garments be always white" Ecclesiastes 9:8. I chose to follow this literally - I wore white pants, a white shirt and a white jacket. This was one of the best things I did all year. I felt lighter, happier, purer. Clothes make the man: You can't be in a bad mood when you're dressed like you're about to play the semi-finals at Wimbledon.
* No gossip. When you try to go on a gossip diet, you realize just how much of our conversations involve negative speech about others. But holding your tongue is like the verbal equivalent of wearing white. I felt cleaner and untainted.
* No images. If you interpret the second commandment literally, then it tells you not to make a likeness of anything in heaven, on earth, or underwater. Which pretty much covers it. So I tried to eliminate photos, TV, movies, doodling. It made me realize we're too visual in this culture. It made me fall in love once again with words, with text.
* Give thanks. The Bible says to thank the Lord after meals. I did that. Perhaps too much. I got carried away. I gave thanks for everything - for the subway coming on time, for the comfortableness of my couch, etc. It was strange but great. Never have I been so aware of the thousands of little things that go right in our lives."
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3 comments:
Even though AJ Jacobs undertook this exericse for purposes other than religious devotion, it is interesting to note that hi imitation of biblical teachings affected him in a positive manner.
I vaguely recall,due to AJ Jacobs experiement, a line from Syed Hujweri's book, Kashf ul Mahjub, that even imitators of Sufis may in some ways eventually come to the right path.
On a related "Green/community" note, I thought you may be interested in this article: "The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors" (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25332.htm).
Wow. Thank you for sharing!!
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