The Year of Living Biblically by Jacobs A.J

Author:Jacobs, A.J. [Jacobs, A.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Adult, Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, Spiritual, Religion, Humor
ISBN: 9780743291477
Amazon: 0743291476
Barnesnoble: 0743291476
Goodreads: 495395
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-10-08T23:00:00+00:00

— 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.

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