Living Biblically

I've been busy with some wonderful travels...to San Francisco for the CCAR Convention and to Florida for a gathering with my oldest childhood friends.

Now, as we prepare for seder, I want to resume reflecting on some of the things I've been reading about. I recently finished an intriguing book called The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs.

The book is mostly entertaining and is not written to be a scholarly work on the Bible. I don't want to overanalyze the book or overwhelm the premise withe my own tastes.

The author's project was to spend a year following the instructions of the Bible as literally as possible...by his own direct reading of the bible, not by living as an Orthodox Jew or a fundamentalist Christian or within any of the other orthodox established religious communities. Jacobs doesn't want to follow the Talmud's definitions of the Bible, he hopes to follow the Bible by itself.

There is an obvious difficulty when it comes to this approach. I, as a Reform Jew, will be the first one that says it is difficult and perhaps impossible to follow the biblical teachings literally. We need to interpret the verses in order to extract their importance. Following the verses literally can sometimes be silly and can sometimes ignore the context in which the bible was written.

In addition, there's another bias that I brought to reading this book. I love the Talmud and the Midrash, the classic works of the first rabbis. I lvoe them not because they provide me with definitive guidance...I often depart from what is taught in those texts. However, they are the very best effort to give definition to the Bible. We shouldn't wipe out their work in our own study of the Bible.

The joy of Talmud study is that we wrestle with the personalities of those great sages. We wrestle with the meaning and intent of the Bible in its own context and also with the meaning and intent of the rabbis who first read the Bible .

The book is a quick read with some entertaining parts. I enjoyed reading about the author's different "site visits", to the Orthodox, to the Amish, and to other communities. I also appreciated the author's attempts to understand the ethical importance of the Bible.

Most of all, I would encourage you to read this book both for entertainment but also because it forces us to ask an important question: where do we find guidance and inspiration?

Enjoy! I look forward to hearing any thoughts you have about the book.