Groundhog Day – 1993: A Story About Becoming a Mensch

I can trace the moment I began taking my moral life seriously to two unlikely sources: Wagner and Groundhog Day. I’ve already described what Wagner contributed. Groundhog Day gave me something else entirely – a moral blueprint masquerading as a Bill-Murray-falling-in-love comedy.

I didn’t know what Mussar was back then. (I write about it here.) I didn’t know middot, or any of the vocabulary of Jewish ethics. But when I finally learned them decades later, I recognized them instantly – because I had already seen them in 1993. Phil Connors had walked me through the whole system long before I had words for it: repetition, attention, small daily repairs, and the slow work of becoming someone better than you were yesterday.

Lots of traditions have tried to claim Groundhog Day – Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, self-help gurus. But both the writer (Danny Rubin) and the director (Harold Ramis) were Jewish, and the film’s moral DNA is unmistakably Jewish. Ramis himself was a mensch; I saw it firsthand when his daughter graduated from UC Santa Cruz and he delivered the best commencement speech I’ve ever heard. Smart, warm, funny, humane – exactly the moral texture the film is built on.

Groundhog Day shows what ethical transformation looks like when you strip out theology entirely. No God, no doctrine, no divine scoreboard. Just the same alarm clock, I’ve Got You Babe, the same damn day – until Phil has no choice but to see himself clearly. He tries everything except becoming decent. He indulges every appetite, manipulates, lies, seduces, steals, tries to die, sulks, rages. And eventually, because nothing else works, he tries something different: he tries becoming a better human being.

Phil begins chock-full of flaws but slowly grows their opposites. He learns to see people as actual people, not scenery. The old homeless man. The kid falling from the tree. Rita, recognized as a person rather than a conquest. Even Ned Ryerson. Phil shifts from self-centered to other-centered because he finally pays attention.

Here’s where teshuvah enters – not the divine-ledger version, but the behavioral one. The version that means turning toward better action. Phil doesn’t escape the loop by apologizing. He changes through working on himself daily. He becomes the kind of person others are genuinely better off having around.

That’s Judaism in a sentence: responsibility over belief; positive action over confession.

And the film nails the most important point: the loop doesn’t break when Phil “understands” something. It breaks when kindness stops being a tactic and becomes who he is. When generosity becomes habit. When he becomes a mensch.

This film stayed with me long before Judaism was even on my radar. It didn’t offer theology – which would not have drawn me in – but it offered a moral framework that hit me. Wagner gave me the visceral feeling of goodness; Groundhog Day showed me the daily mechanics:  repair yesterday’s damage by acting differently, try again tomorrow given what you learned yesterday.

I didn’t convert because of Groundhog Day. But Judaism hit home for me so much because Phil Connors had already spent decades showing me what a Jewish moral life looks like, one repeated February morning at a time.

What's "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once" Got To Do With It?

By the time I sat down to watch Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022, I’d already been circling Judaism for years without fully realizing it. I’ve blogged about how Wagner's music and Groundhog Day pointed me in that direction. This film was simply the last artistic push. But the deeper reasons — my Jewish friends, the community I found myself in, the way Jewish culture felt like “the one” long before I converted — those will be their own posts.

So when the film opened to Evelyn Wang — exhausted, overloaded, trying to hold everything together — I knew exactly who she was. I was Evelyn Wang at times. She’s overextended, overcommitted, and the words “I’m very busy” are basically her mantra. (They were mine.) In the multiverse, she’s thrown into the chaos of her own near-infinite possibilities and has to choose her values consciously for the first time in her life — not when things are calm, but at the height of overload.

And then there’s her husband, Waymond — the character who shows how you actually live that choice. People misread him as naïve or soft. He’s neither. Waymond has simply decided that kindness is the only way to live. He defuses tension, de-escalates conflict and responds to cruelty with gentleness — not because it’s easy, but because it’s the only tactic that makes moral sense and, in the best case, can change people through kindness.

Waymond’s approach is something close to Mussar: the belief that who you become is shaped by your daily actions, not your cosmic insights. If the universe is absurd, then kindness isn’t sentimental. It’s strategic. It’s how you stay human.

Jobu Tupaki — their daughter — is the film’s nihilist, burned out on the multiverse itself. She’s furious, exhausted and convinced that if every possibility exists, then none of them matter. Her solution is the everything bagel, an over-the-top way of ending it all in one ridiculous breakfast vortex.

Only then — after all the chaos — does Evelyn finally see and understand Waymond, and from that, understand how to reach her daughter. And in the key scene, she reaches Joy not by denying the chaos but by reframing it: if nothing matters, then choose what does. Like Waymond, choose kindness. Choose connection.

I’ve always been an existentialist at heart. Life is chaotic. Meaning isn’t guaranteed. You choose your values and stand behind them. But existentialism doesn’t give you a way to live those values consistently. It doesn’t give you practices, or community, or accountability. It doesn’t help you keep choosing kindness when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed or pulled in too many directions — which, let’s be honest, is often.

Judaism does.

Judaism accepts the existential starting point — that meaning comes from our choices — and adds everything existentialism leaves out. It gives you middot to work on, one by one. It gives you rhythms and rituals that interrupt the chaos and bring you back to yourself. It gives you community. It gives you a way to return when you stray — not through guilt, but through teshuvah: course-correction through action.

In other words, Judaism makes Waymond’s philosophy livable — and livable in community.

Everything Everywhere All at Once didn’t introduce me to a new worldview; it illuminated the one I already had. And it showed me the missing piece: if I wanted to live that worldview with intention — if I wanted to be kind in a world that doesn’t make sense — I needed a framework that made that choosing sustainable for me.

Judaism was that framework.

EEAAO made something obvious to me: the world can be chaotic, but kindness, responsibility and how you treat people still matter. It didn’t send me somewhere new. It pushed me further into who I already was — and toward the tradition that finally gave that a form.

My Mikveh and Biopsy Day (with a Jury Duty twist)

Edit June 19th: No jury duty. The lump on the tongue got smaller; no biopsy. Mikveh was great!

On June 19th, I’ll kind of become a Jew.

Technically, my conversion isn’t official until June 20th, after I talk with three rabbis at a Beit Din (a Jewish court) and—unless I am found wanting—they wave their magic wands and accept me into the tribe. Normally, the order goes: Beit Din first, then mikveh—the ritual immersion in water that seals the deal.

So why am I doing it backward? Well. That’s where jury duty comes in.