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.