When I was nine I discovered a pile of pornographic magazines in the woods behind my house. I was in yeshiva at the time, or I might not have realized that God was testing me as He had once tested Abraham with the sacrifice of Isaac. "Nice try," I said, and ran home. But I returned the next day, and the magazines hadn't moved. I failed right there in the woods. I brought the magazines home, and failed straight through the evening. When my parents left the next morning to do some errands, I took the magazines out back with a bottle of lighter fluid, laid them down on the cement walkway, and offered them up as a sin offering to the Lord.

A few weeks later, I found my father's dirty magazines, and I burnt those, too. And my brother's. And my mother's vibrator. And a "Betty And Veronica Comics Digest," which Rabbi Goldfisher said was tumeh, or impure, and a tool of the Evil Inclination.

For a few years, simple sacrifices sufficed.