COMMENTARY: High Holidays provide way to escape life’s treadmill

(RNS) “Groundhog Day” remains a popular film even though it was released in 1993. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a sardonic TV reporter forced to cover the annual ritual in Punxsutawney, Pa., where the appearance of a weather forecasting rodent on February 2 allegedly predicts the arrival of spring. Scoffing at such nonsense, Connors grudgingly […]

(RNS) “Groundhog Day” remains a popular film even though it was released in 1993. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a sardonic TV reporter forced to cover the annual ritual in Punxsutawney, Pa., where the appearance of a weather forecasting rodent on February 2 allegedly predicts the arrival of spring.

Scoffing at such nonsense, Connors grudgingly describes the event for his viewers, but once done with the hokey ritual, he is eager to return home.

However, Murray’s misanthropic character is condemned to relive every event of Groundhog Day again and again and again. Each day is exactly the same as the last one; nothing changes. The trapped Connors lives on an endless treadmill of life. Ultimately, he is freed from his dreary daily duplication by a combination of love and good deeds, including saving the lives of a choking man and a boy who falls from a tree.


The film can serve as a metaphor for the Jewish High Holidays. The two day observance of Rosh Hashana, the religious New Year, begins on Wednesday (Sept. 8) evening; 10 days later is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which starts at sundown Friday, Sept. 17, and ends 25 hours later.

The biblical verses Leviticus 23:24 and Numbers 29:1 command Jews to observe Rosh Hashana, and Yom Kippur. Interestingly, both holidays are purely spiritual in tone and substance. They do not commemorate historic events, as do Passover and Hanukkah.

Many of us can identify with the daily tedium portrayed by Murray. While each day is different, we frequently behave exactly the same way year after year after year. We take for granted our families, friends, and co-workers, and repeat our ethical lapses of judgment and action with the lame excuse that “everyone does it.” We are often unable and unwilling to contemplate any significant change in our public and private behavior.

But the High Holidays arrive each autumn filled with extraordinary emotional and spiritual power. Their themes are profound, yet simple: acknowledge our errors and sins, seek ways to atone for our actions that have hurt our fellow humans and dishonored the name of God, and finally, begin the difficult but necessary personal healing process of “teshuvah,” the Hebrew term for repentance.

Key to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is the overworked term “change.” Everyone uses the word, but few of us truly mean it or desire it — in the political arena or in our personal lives. Purposeful “change” is embedded in the very name Rosh Hashana. The root of the Hebrew “shanah,” or year, is the verb “to change.”

For Judaism, life is not a dreary unchanging journey to oblivion. Each “shanah” offers an opportunity to view ourselves as we really are and provides a chance to make major changes in our lives.


But real change is never easy, and requires a prescribed set of rituals and joining with millions of other Jews during the High Holidays. That is why Jews in large numbers absent themselves from work or school and other usual daily activities on the New Year and the Day of Atonement. That is why Jews attend special synagogue services on both holidays, and that is why adults fast on Yom Kippur. The absence of food and liquids for a full day strips away our carefully constructed defenses of complacency, comfort and conceit.

During the High Holidays, we ask ourselves three difficult questions: What have we done with our finite lives during the past twelve months? Where are we today in our lives? Are we replicating “Groundhog Day” by doing the same thing over and over again and achieving the same negative results each time?

Just as the cinematic Phil Connors broke out of his trap of repetition, the High Holidays provide a way to escape our own treadmills of life: genuine personal repentance, sincere prayer, and acts of charity and righteousness.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the forthcoming “Christians & Jews, Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future.”)

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