Every Christmas, we watch a rerun of Charles Dickens‘ ‚A Christmas Carol‘ in the form of Bill Murray’s comedy ‚Scrooged.‘ Just like the nativity scene with the Savior in the hay never loses its shine, Scrooge never stops speaking to me. I’ve seen it thirty times, yet every time, I hide my tears when Frank Cross invites the whole world to the Christmas party in front of the camera at the end.

The story is familiar: three spirits confront the miser Ebenezer Scrooge. But in the 1988 version, there’s this special moment when Bill Murray stumbles out of the elevator and exclaims as a new person, “I was a schmuck!” – the Yiddish term for ‚idiot.‘ Right at that point, I jump on the couch, and my heart races. In Hebrew, there’s the brilliant concept of ‚teshuva‘ – the turnaround, 180 degrees – the timeless tales of homecoming, of repentance, of the long journey back. Found in Homer’s Odyssey. Or in ‚The Wizard of Oz,‘ where Dorothy utters the unforgettable line: “There’s no place like home.” Or in Frodo’s return to the Shire.

Perhaps sometimes, striving for higher, farther, and faster is a wrong path. Instead, the right way leads back to the familiar – a ticket home, where everything was once good. So, Odysseus sails for ten years to be with Penelope. Dorothy takes the long way back to Kansas with a cowardly lion, a brainless scarecrow, and a heartless tin man. And Frodo takes the perilous detour to Mount Doom, to one day reside in his Hobbit hole again.

Great stories move and intoxicate us. And my wife tugs at my shirt, saying, “Please, get off the couch.” Who knows, perhaps Bill Murray has gifted us the first four words with which our own bestseller of homecoming begins: “I was a schmuck.”