Trivial pursuit part deux
Last year A.J. Jacobs, the hilarious writer from Esquire Magazine, gave us The Know-it-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World in which he spent a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Now for his follow up, the New York Post reports, Jacobs (a descendant of the Vilna Gaon) will write what it’s like to follow all the rules in the Bible for one year. “It’s not just the 10 Commandments – that’s easy,” Jacobs said. With about 613 rules in the Good Book, Jacobs has his work cut out for him. “The stoning will be the toughest thing, what with the pesky assault laws in the United States,” Jacobs joked. “My wife is also very upset about the requirement that I wear a 3-foot-long beard.”
Cross-posted from TribeWrite.
Is he going to be making animal sacrifices? Somehow, I don’t see this project going very far once he actually reads the book cover to cover.
Yep, how far is he going to take it?
Maybe it would be better if he lived as a frum Jew just for a year. Not out of devotion or to be a baal teshuvah, but just for the sheer experience of it?
There’s a commandment to have a 3-foot-long beard in the Torah? must have missed that one in my 12 years of jewish school…. Is he going by his own interpretations or by some halachic framework?