Adult Ed

It was Lenny Bruce who explained that Count Basie, Ray Charles, black cherry soda, and Italians are all Jewish. Also fruit salad. Fruit salad is obviously Jewish. So is the movie Groundhog Day - he didn't say that, I did. But you can see it, right? The movie is a fast-tracked swing through the annual cycle of High Holy Days introspection. We live our lives the way we want, and then Yom Kippur rolls around with the fasting and the praying intensifying as darkness approaches and we collectively remember our failings and ask, "Who shall have six more weeks of winter, and who shall enjoy an early spring?"

Is there anything more Jewish than that? And just in case we missed the point of Yom Kippur, we follow it up with Simchat Torah, the holiday on which we finally read the last verse of the Torah and then immediately celebrate by starting over again with the first verse. I tell my young students that it's like reading Goodnight Moon over and over. How long was it before you realized that tiny mouse was doing something different on every one of the colored pages? With the older kids, I ask them when they realized that at least a third of the jokes in the Pixar movies meant something totally different to the grownups. And I remind them that it - the book, the movie, the Torah - hasn't changed at all, but we have. Which is how we find new meaning in something so familiar.

In the Talmud, Ben Bag Bag put it this way, "Turn it over, and turn it over again, because everything is in it. Look into it, and become gray and old with it, and do not move away from it, for you have no better portion than it." Which, by the way, is a solid five-star review of the Torah.

I'll be honest. I had no idea Groundhog Day was a Jewish movie - Ned Ryerson notwithstanding - until I started thinking about this loop we're in right now. There's a sameness to every day, and yet it is most definitely not the same sameness that it was a month ago which tells me that even though it seems like it's going to be the same next month, it's a pretty safe bet that it'll be a different sameness. Like Yom Kippur last year versus the first Yom Kippur service you remember. Same. And very different. The holiday doesn't really change, but we do. Or maybe parts of us didn't change but the holiday did?

It was said that the Baal Shem Tov could light a very special kind of sacred fire, and when he was troubled by a difficult problem, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light that sacred fire, and pray. Each time he did, he would find the wisdom he needed to solve the problem. His successor, Rabbi Dov Bear, followed his example and went to the same place in the woods that he had seen his master go, but Dov Bear didn’t know the secret to lighting the fire so he would say, “We can no longer light the fire, but this is the spot and we can still say the prayer.” And he, too, found what he needed. Another generation passed, and Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov went to the woods to find wisdom. He said, “The fire we can no longer light, the prayer we no longer remember; all we know is the place in the woods, and that will have to suffice.” And it did. In the fourth generation, Rabbi Israel of Rishin stayed at home and said, “The fire we can no longer light, the prayer we no longer know, nor do we remember the place. All we can do is tell the story.” And that, too, proved sufficient.

Rabbi Israel of Rishin? Definitely Jewish. He would have liked Lenny Bruce. And he would have loved Groundhog Day which is so careful not to rush into redemptive behavior because...well, how many of us do that? We struggle with the same things today that we struggled with yesterday. That's what it means to be human. To be Jewish is to be stuck in a loop and aspire to be Bill Murray even if all we can hope for is to be Rabbi Israel of Rishin stuck at home saying, "This will have to suffice." Rabbi Israel never did master the art of sourdough starter, he did not Marie Kondo his linen closet, and he didn't even start learning that foreign language he always thought it would be fun to know. But he kept telling the story and you know what? He died in 1850 and we're still telling his story. He knew what it meant to be human. So does Judaism.

The Talmud says, "It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it." Come on, it's the Talmud, it wasn't going to tell us to do nothing but Netflix and chill. But it doesn't expect us to become Bill Murray, just to keep working on being us for as long as we're in the loop. That seems reasonable to me. And even potentially redemptive.

Stay connected to yourself, reach out to your loved ones, be well, watch Groundhog Day on Netflix, learn Judaism from Bill Murray, and let me know if there's anything I can do to help.