By Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal
SAN DIEGO — By a strange confluence of fortuitous happenstance this Shabbat, on which we read parashat Yitro, is also Groundhog Day.
Groundhog Day celebrates a commonly held folk belief. If a groundhog emerges from its burrow on February 2 and sees its shadow, winter will linger for another six weeks. However, if it is cloudy outside and said shadow does not exist, then spring is on its way.
Punxsutawney Phil is America’s most celebrated groundhog. Every year hordes of the curious and a plethora of journalists make their way to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to see what Phil will predict.
Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania is the setting of a 1993 feature film named appropriately enough: “Groundhog Day.”
Saturday Night Live alum Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, an obnoxious and self centered TV weatherman who, for the last four
years, has been sentenced to cover Phil’s emergence on Groundhog Day. A storm forces him to spend the night in Punxsutawney. When he wakes up the next morning he finds himself back at the beginning of the previous day, which takes place all over again.
The next morning the same thing occurs and Connors finds himself in an endless loop of repeated events. He is stuck and can’t move his life forward until he changes the way he sees the world and improves his relationships with those around him. This takes him many repeated days and a lot of soul searching.
In parashat Yitro God appears on Mt. Sinai with a special revelation for Moses and the Children of Israel. From the midst of fire, thunder, clouds, and lighting, God gives Moses the Ten Commandments. What purpose do they serve? They are a basic code of divine-human and human-human interaction: Accept Adonai as your God, observe the Sabbath, honor your parents, don’t murder, etc. As evangelical minister Pat Robertson once wrote, “…these commandments are recognized by Christians and Jews alike as being the foundation of our system of public morality.”
Although the Torah contains 613 commandments, if everyone obeyed just these ten we would live in a far different, happier, and kinder world.
It’s too bad that weatherman Phil Connors didn’t have a Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) with him, or at least live in accordance with the Ten Commandments. If he had, he might have gotten out of Punxsutawney sooner.
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Rabbi Rosenthal is spiritual leader of Tifereth Israel Synagogue. He may be contacted at leonard.rosenthal@sdjewishworld.com