Love | U.S. Senator Cory Booker

On October 23, 2022 US Senator Cory Booker returned to New Haven to celebrate his 25th Yale Law School Reunion.

In the following film he addresses members of the Law School at the Anderson Mansion, home of Shabtai at Yale.

Cory reminisced of co-founding the society as a Law Student in 1996 and how it continues to inspire him daily in uniting all people with love and respect.

LOVE | U.S. Senator Cory Booker

  • Cory Booker: I want to just say something about Shmully. To be honest with you, my perspective on life- I think by the time I got into my 40s, Shmully, I just began to see things that I couldn't explain.

    Cory Booker: Its why, in many ways, I surrender to this idea of divine power and a universe where there's wisdom and there's love. And because I look at my life and it's just extraordinary to see the blessings of unanswered prayers, to see how the worst things often turn out to be the best lessons or opportunities, but also to see the gentle grace of God that I would meet people on my journey that would so source my soul and nurture my spirit. And so I came to Yale exhausted with school. I had done an undergraduate master's at Stanford. I did two years at Oxford and came here, and my first year was incredible. 1L was wonderful, but the whole time I felt something was missing because I'm this random big black goy who loves Judaism and had fallen in love with it in England and had been and found a community there. And in the middle of this island in the North Atlantic, I found this incredible thing that I was told to my faith as part of the Ten Commandments, honoring the Sabbath, that honoring it by having a community around you and the community was incredibly diverse that we created in England. It had, you know, I brought Muslim friends of mine to the Shabbat tables. I brought Christian friends of mine, Jewish friends of mine who never even lit a Shabbat candle.

    Cory Booker: People that ascribe to no faith. People that were fiercely atheists. But yet we all found this incredible community. And to me, there's a song sung during the High Holidays. Ki beiti Beit tefilah yikoray lichol haamim,  Hebrew taught to me by Shmully. That may my house be a house of prayer for for many nations. And it was this one point in my life where I felt, wow, look at this diverse table. Look at this connection that I have. This is something really special. And then when I got here, I had an incredible 1L experience. But what was missing for me was something special rooted in conceptions of faith. And that's when my divine path was led to meet Shmully on his 21st birthday. And we talked about this grand vision for having that community, that point of community here at Yale. And it was five guys around a Shabbat table. I have such great memories of that apartment. It was really, really. I loved the house, but that small apartment having Shabbat dinners there became one of my favorite parts of my Yale experience, and having deep discussions about things that mattered, not political debates. And I'm sure we've had those and I'm sure they've been here. But really, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live a good life? What does it mean to be a good person? And so I come back here with Shmully, our lives have, you know, gone on 25 years.

    Cory Booker: It's incredible to think about how much has changed. But I still, when I'm here in his presence, I feel that same innocence of 25 years ago. Of two souls that are still seeking to see how we can connect and commune with the divine here on Earth. And the way you do that, and the way I found that in Yale was you don't do that by sitting in some isolated place and meditating in a cave. You do that by connecting with other people, especially people that may not pray like you, may not look like you, may not vote like you. But at the same time when you see the divinity in them. Nonetheless, I think that the heavens rejoice. So thank you for that. Now, now, forgive me because I like to pace sometimes. Your shoes are in danger, man. And I know the camera's going to have a tough time sort of keeping up to me. So this is what I love to do. I'd love to maybe tell a story or two. And then, I was enjoying I was standing here and we started. Different people were asking me different questions. I think it'd be much more fun. As much as this is not as intimate as the apartment, but maybe we could just have a little bit of a back and forth where you all can ask me questions.

    Cory Booker: And I am an inquisitor myself, so I may ask you questions, but I know that there are a lot of people here who've never been to this house before. I know the undergraduates are not here, but a lot of law students are in this room. God bless you. I'll pray for you. But you're at Yale, for crying out loud which is. I mean, we literally talked my small groups torts professor, out of giving us a final. We had- I had no torts final. I mean, you want to talk about, like, I felt like that was a great instruction. It was persuasive speaking. Like we convinced this guy, you do not want to grade our papers. We basically said, you don't want to go through that. And so I had no. And so to this day, it's true. I did not learn torts until I studied for the bar. So that's that's when I finally learned torts. So I'm not feeling sympathy for Yale law students. I really feel sympathy for law students who go to real law schools. I mean, I mean, if you look at my transcript, which I hope nobody ever- it never surfaces. But my classes were not, you know, things like, you know, corporate transactions. They were like the book of Job and the law.

    Cory Booker: And Shmully, you'll find it hard to believe I did really well in that class. So but I just want you all to know that I said this in many of you probably were in the conversation I had with Chris Coons that I feel like we're all Americans. And I know there's some people who I talked to earlier who are not citizens of this country, but your citizens of a world that is just becoming more fractured and more strident. You're seeing more extremism. And it's a time where there's just rising hate. We were at a synagogue, Hannah and I, doing a meeting with Matt Platkin, who's the attorney general for New Jersey. And we were meeting with a lot of Jewish leaders talking about what we were doing to try to protect synagogues in New Jersey from threats because hate crimes in our state, as across this country, have gone up remarkably. Stunningly, I live on this great block in Newark, where at the top of my block, I have a Spanish language church, at the bottom of my block I have a masjid and it's just delicious to me. I mean, I have so many different languages spoken on my block. I have people from all around the human sort of diaspora of the globe. You know, my neighbors, literally, there are Ecuadorians, a family from Mali and a family from Brazil, living in the three family home next to me.

    Cory Booker: But the other day, I went Friday, I went down to the Juma, the Muslim call to prayer. And I went down, and I don't know what. I just felt this because usually I just say hi to the men and women going down to pray. Assalamu Alaikum, Wa Alaikum Assalam. Peace be with you and also with you as a response. And I decided just to walk down. And then I decided to go in. And next thing you know, I'm sitting in the back, praying, pointing east with these incredible people from my community and sharing prayer. But I was very. As a former mayor, I noted that there were police in front protecting the mosque. And that is like reality. I'm literally working to get more money into my state to protect our religious institutions, because from Sikh Americans to Muslim Americans to Asian Americans to Black Americans, hate crimes are going up. As Platkin said in our state - Hannah, if I remember correctly - he said the most threatened group is Jews. They have the most hate crimes in our state against them. And it was not why I wanted to be a senator. It was to protect people from rising hate. And it gets me into this place of moral worry. Like, why are we in this society in 2022 at a point where we're seeing heights of hatred, heights of hate crimes, what is happening in our generations that we are perceiving over it? Now, I'm not saying it's unique.

    Cory Booker: I mean, most people forget before World War II, there was a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden packed. You had the extremism back then too, which also correlated to now to extremisms and stratifications of wealth. You had demagoguery. We're not unique in demagoguery. There's been demagogues in every generation, from McCarthy, Father Coughlin, some of you don't know. It's like the number one radio host who'd spew anti-Semitism out there. So I struggle with this. What is the call of our generation to get out of this increasing level of hate. And I look at a lot of challenges. A pandemic, interestingly, I was talking to this Doctor Christakis who's who's some of you all know him. You guys know him? Yeah okay. Yeah yeah. You know and he was telling me that like pandemics have done this to many societies, the weary societies coming out of pandemics, there's a lot more sense of isolation, a lot more mental health issues. And he was talking about the patterns that we often go through, fear, conspiracy theories. All the things we're seeing right now are very much a human pattern of the great plagues of the past which I think is contributing to it. But even before the pandemic, we were seeing these things increase. I went through the toughest politics.

    Cory Booker: If you ever a chance and want to watch a movie, and I mentioned this in the talk yesterday, the movie Street Fight, which was a movie about my first run for mayor in the city of Newark. And you wouldn't believe it. I mean, it was like, you know, thuggery and violence, and it was just basically this small group of ragtag folks trying to storm the Death Star. And no in seriousness, just trying to take down a big city machine. And it captured it unbelievably. This guy got nominated for an Academy Award. He won the Tribeca Film Festival with the documentary. And I just remember that in those days starting out, we were still getting to a society where our politics were becoming a lot more extreme as well. And in politics, and you see it in the movie, if you have 87 minutes to spare that we were talking to each other in a way that I just believe undermines the values that we profess to ascribe to. And so I say all this to say that my heart right now in my team and I talk about a lot, we want to do the practical blocking and tackling of getting things done. And I'm proud of. I've been in the Senate for the Senate, its short time, nine years. Any other job, that's a long time.

    Cory Booker: But Halloween will be my ninth anniversary in the Senate. It's a strange time. I got elected in a special election on the auspicious day of Halloween. But I'm proud that we have been folks who found ways to work across the aisle and pass the biggest comprehensive criminal justice reform. Tim Scott and I wrote this great bill called Opportunity Zones. We've done my staff had done work on so many fronts, probably one of the most exciting things we ever did when Ossoff and Warnock were elected, we literally didn't even wait. As soon as we knew we had 50 senators, we started lobbying the with Rosa DeLauro, actually. Your congresswoman was one of my allies in the House. I should say I was one of her allies in the Senate because she is the grande dame of this legislation. But we said, hey, let's get an expansion of the child tax credit, which for some of you who know about that, that what we did was, you know, America is one of the few industrial nations that has such a low child allowance. And what the child tax credit basically did is issue the largest middle class tax cut in the history of the United States of America, more people keeping more money from their tax bill. And it elevated cut child poverty in half. And I'm proud of this because the data that's coming out is unbelievable.

    Cory Booker: Children under poverty, literally their brains have different growth patterns. They now see because of the constant anxiety and stress of a family in poverty. It's like a kid in poverty is like one of us having a minor traffic accident every day. It just rattles you consistently. And so I'm proud of a lot of the things my team and I have gotten done. But we feel that part of our mission, especially that being divinely granted and granted by the voters of New Jersey, this public platform that we think constructively about. How can we be a force of healing? How can we be a force that fosters a greater sense of common purpose, a greater sense of common cause in this country? How can we be an office that inspires the best of ourselves as well as humanity? And how can we be an office that ultimately helps our nation? Evidence what I think are the best values of our country, which have many different words. But I think it's love. Patriotism is love of country, but you can't love your country if you don't love your fellow countrymen and women. And that doesn't mean we have to agree on everything. Hell no. I'm sure that Shmully and Toby do not agree on everything. But. Correct. But we don't have to agree on everything. But we can't have. We can't hate each other.

    Cory Booker: We can't have a culture of contempt and so that's what's on my heart and mind. I hope we can have a conversation about about it all. But I want you to know that, you know, we took all of our social media platforms now, and people are like, some of my colleagues are like, what are you doing? Like, we post videos every day, have nothing to do about who to vote for, politics, policy. We just start with sort of a d'var Torah every day. I don't say d'var Torah because most of America has no idea what I'm talking about, so it's sort of a moral message. Try to speak to the best of our spirit and we try. And again, I've had my two best teachers, two best teachers in my life, probably two of my better teachers, maybe I should say, were the guy I ran against in the movie Street Fight and Donald Trump, because they showed me the best of who I am, and they showed me the worst of who I am and things I don't like about myself that I need to work on. I mean, Donald Trump is a great example. I mean, the worst of who I was is he called other countries shithole countries. And then I had a week of really painful conversations with Haitian Americans stopping me in train stations, and I just saw how hurtful it felt to so many Americans, so many immigrants to hear their countries of origin referred to that way.

    Cory Booker: And by the time the hearing came with, somebody was in the room. And by the way, friends of mine like Lindsey Graham and others were like, yeah, he kind of said that. But the head of Homeland Security was denying it and it was a public hearing. And we're going around and she keeps arguing with people over this, trying to follow the line of Donald Trump didn't say it. It wasn't me. I think that was a great song. What of me? Yeah. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? And by the time it got to me, I was so fed up and I just vented. It was so cathartic. Speaking out of anger will be the best speech you ever regret. And I just remembered that. And afterwards, I just felt bad. That's not who I am. I don't rip into human beings just to vent upon them. But then I saw the best of myself. I still remember the first time Donald Trump ever tweeted about me, which is a great moment, by the way, because you are important enough to be tweeted about. It was incredible. Incredible. At the end of his 2020 campaign, I became a part of his stump speech, which was very exciting to me. He was telling people, he was saying to people, oh, and if Biden wins, you know who he's going to put in charge of housing? It's Cory Booker, and Cory Booker is going to come to the suburbs and destroy the suburbs.

    Cory Booker: And then I got weeks of the best tweets of my life, like suburban women tweeting at me saying, I hope Cory Booker comes to my suburb. I was just like, I love I, I've never felt so wanted. But it was during this was before Trump was president. My first Trump tweet was when he was watching the convention, the Democratic convention, and I had given a speech that night that would have been a really great speech. But I felt like Joachim Prinz, who is a Joachim Prinz, if you don't know, he is a great Newark rabbi who was one of the five people that spoke on the March on Washington. Look up Johann Prince's speech. It is an amazing speech, but he, unfortunately was the guy that spoke right before Martin Luther King. So I gave a speech that my mom runs up to me at the end of the night and says, what an amazing speech. This is my mother. I'm like, oh, thank you, mom. She goes, not your speech, Michelle Obama. So positioning is very important people. So anyway, the next morning I'm on with Cuomo when he had this morning show and they're trying to build up the drama because that's what these shows want to do.

    Cory Booker: They want to fire up the like, the hate and the conflict and whatever. So Cuomo puts the tweet up and he says, this is what, Donald, what's your response to Donald Trump? And I said, my response to Donald Trump is, I love you. I love you. I'm never going to let you pull me so low as to hate you. So I love you. I don't want you to be my president, but I'm not going to stop loving you. So these are my teachers. This is a guy named Sharpe James and a guy named Donald Trump. Because I can't control what they say. But the power you have, if you've read Man's Search for Meaning, I think this is one of the great themes of that book, is you can't control the stimulus in your life, but the power that you have is always in how you respond. And all of this stuff out here, outside of you, this is your school. It really is. Every moment, every day is your chance to learn lessons of love, in my opinion, is how are you going to choose to respond? Are you going to respond from a place of power or a place of purpose? In fact, the parsha, you all, for those who are Jewish in the room, we started anew with Genesis and I never knew this. I study now with a friend of mine, the parsha, every week, and try to explain that to your sort of Catholic ish chief of staff, that you need to schedule the senator every week to study the parsha with some Chabad rabbi.

    Cory Booker: But Veronica's spiritual Reiki teacher. She's just, you know, she'll read your tarot cards after this if you want. So this week's Torah portion is really great because I never saw Genesis chapter one, verse five. I was perplexed by it. It is about it says, the first day there was the evening and the morning, and that was the first day. I thought the first day starts in the morning and ends at night. And what I realized, and this is sort of for me, how do I best show up for the work for the day ahead? It's by what I do the night before. Do I get a good night's sleep? Am I eating right or am I out drinking or what have you? All these things are preparing you to show up in the world. So for me, my journey is so much about how do I show up every day and do I show up with my best? Or do I let somebody trigger me? Because when they trigger me, it's not their fault. My trigger is a signpost, you know, to a place I have to grow and learn. If you go home this weekend and somebody in your family says something that triggers you, it's on you.

    Cory Booker: It's not on them. And so this to me is for me, the journey for myself. I can't control what everybody does in this world, but I'm going to try every day to show up with a different frequency. The story I told yesterday that really I found really powerful was when I was running for a stage in Iowa, and I was just about to jump on the stage to give a speech, and a big guy sees me and he goes, he goes, dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face. And I go to him, dude, that's a felony. Yeah, yeah. I mean, something I picked up in law school, but, you know, and you don't change anything with that energy. You don't. It's like doubling down on the problem, and it may feel good to say that and to use that kind of language, but everything that you say, the power of the word, this is again, all in your genesis or this Torah portion. Everything you say carries energy. Everything you do carries energy, what energy you bring into the world. And I stood up and I told the room. I said, you know, look, Martin Luther King when he, and it really was James Bevel Dorothy Cotton, if you know this story, Taylor Branch's book, The Children's Miracle. It is amazing that that when they took on Bull Connor, it's one of my favorite moments in the civil rights movement.

    Cory Booker: And they faced fire hoses and dogs and how they beat segregation there. It was not by bringing bigger dogs and bigger fire hoses. It's not. They were able to change the frequency, to manifest their power and how do you respond to this world and they manifested their power. And they didn't just change the frequency in Birmingham, they changed the frequency in the whole nation. Suddenly, the moral imagination of the nation was expanded, the conscience of their country was pricked, and thousands of people poured into Birmingham, from Joan Baez to Dick Gregory. And what they said was the most implacable wall of segregation fell in 12 days. That's the power you have when you choose what frequency you're going to bring to the world, how you're going to perfect that frequency. And so I don't know the answers. And I hope you guys should feel free to ask me about anything, but I know there's something special when you strip away all the partisan rhetoric and the big policy debates of the day and just connect to people on a human level. There's a great book called The Souls of Black Folk, written by W.E.B. Du Bois, where, I used to have this memorized. It was such a powerful section of the book.

    Cory Booker: He goes, and so forgive me, it's a paraphrase, not a quote, because I'll get it wrong. But he's basically in a world where it means so much to shake a person's hands more than legislative debates and magazine articles, to sit beside someone on the same park bench, to look into their eyes and to feel their heart beat with the same blood. One could imagine the absence of these social amenities that extend to street cars and park benches. And what he was getting at in this section of the book was how tragic it is when we are so separated from each other, even our neighbors. They have a Trump sign up. I got a Biden sign up. That you have now divorced yourself from that that human connection. You know, I love that. I think it was a Catholic missionary that told people go out and be amongst the people until you smell like your flock. You become so intimate that your spirit, the funk of you, is mixing with that of other people. It's why I love Bryan Stevenson's, who was the speaker, that one of the speakers that I was able to bring to Yale when I was here, and the poor guy I like would not let him out of my sight. I was like following, please, Bryan Stevenson, tell me what I should do with my life. Sensei, please.

    Cory Booker: But he talks about something about staying proximate to people like. Like when we go into our own little enclaves, I think we lose our ability to begin to understand our own humanity, our own power, and our own ability to connect. And I'll end with this story and then open it up. So I had this, a great blessing that I pray that you all get as you get older which is to give your parents great nachas. And for for those of you who don't know that word, it's just give them great pride, you know, and the great pride moment for me was my parents, who probably didn't know if I'd ever have enough money in my bank account to afford my own meals. I could call them up one day. I was mayor of the city of Newark, and I said to them, mom, dad, my dad was getting sick with Parkinson's, and I knew this was the last opportunity, and I scraped enough resources together. And I said to my mom and dad, let's go on one more family vacation. Where do you all want to go? Anywhere you want to go. Now, my parents kind of knew about my connection to the Jewish faith, but I didn't think that they- I thought they might say my dad loved the Caribbean. And there's lots of places I thought they might want to go.

    Cory Booker: But without hesitation, my mom says, I want to go to Israel. And for me, that was like the most meaningful thing she could say to me, I was stoked. And so I called a friend of mine, Abe Eizenstat, who is a- I wouldn't say this if he was around because I don't want his head to get big, but he's one of the more, sort of, you know, surround yourself with friends that make you a better person that you want to you aspire to be like. What's that old book that there's a book that was written that said, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And but I call this guy up that makes me a better person, a friend that makes me a better person. And I say my mom and dad want to go to Israel. Can you help me? And so he, like, said, enough. I'm going to help arrange everything. And so he puts together this amazing trip. Now, at this point, I have death threats against me. The FBI had been warning us, mayor of the city of Newark. We're taking on a lot of tough elements. And my security detail, one of whom is still with me outside right now, I think, says to me, you, we should go with you. And I'm like, look, I don't think like the Bloods and the Crips are going to follow me to Israel.

    Cory Booker: I'm like, I'm not really worried about it, but the two guys that my friend had engaged were, he said, look, I'm going to make sure that they are the best people. And so there are two guys who had a tour company who also were former Israeli special forces, which, if you know, Israel kind of makes sense, you know, and, you know, these guys have a little business on the side and, you know. So I go out there and I meet these two guys. Now let me just tell you. Israeli special Forces forces guys are far more intimidating than the average Chabad rabbi that I know from the United States. These guys were tough, and I'm a big dude. But these guys, immediately I realized these guys probably could kill me in like 500 ways. And so and they were tough and gruff and very formal in the way that Shmully tried to be when I first walked up and, you know, like, hello, Mr. Mayor, and, you know, very formal and I'm just like, trying to break the ice. Nothing. None of my jokes are landing. And these guys drive my family to the King David Hotel. We put my parents asleep. I'm, like, dead tired. I'm going to sleep as well. And they go look at me and they go, we will go for a ride.

    Cory Booker: And I'm looking at Abe. I'm like, what? And he looks at me. He goes, I think we should go with them. And so I jump in this jeep middle of the night and we drive and they're silent. I'm trying to make small talk, and I'm getting no small talk out of them. We're just driving. And then we go off the highway into the desert. And now we're going out in the desert. And now I'm a pretty I think I'm a brave guy. But now my cell phone service, no bars and I'm like, oh my God, is this what they do to the goyim when they get them over here? What is about to happen to me? And so now I'm like, oh, I should have brought my security detail. I should have brought my security detail. And then we go up this, like, rise. And then suddenly I see all the lights of the city and we get out and they say, we will build a campfire. We want to get to know the mayor of New Jersey. And I'm like, I'm like, just Newark. And so they build this campfire and we they just open up. And these guys have such like, they could literally point to everything in my vista and tell me recent military history, ancient biblical history, the things I just didn't know about Muslims and Jews fighting together to repel the crusading Christians.

    Cory Booker: You know, it's like I was blown away by their knowledge and their history. And then they point out in the distance and show me Mount Nebo. And as soon as they tell me it's Mount Nebo, I get chills because I'm one of the few, again, non-Jews who often knows the parsha of the week. And when I heard it was Mount Nebo, I connected immediately in my mind the parsha of the week with the fact that I'm standing in front of the Mount Nebo. And so I said, we got to pull out the Torah and you've got to pull out your iPad, which in modern Israel everybody's got both. And so he, they pull out the Torah and I say the Torah portion of this week. But before that, I want to tell you that why that mountain is so important to me as a black guy from America. And I said one of the most important speeches in modern American history, that that mountain was the metaphorical device used in that speech. Because for those of you who don't know, Mount Nebo, which we just finished, a week or two ago, this section of the Torah is where Moses goes to the mountaintop, sees the promised Land, but can't go there. Still struggling with just because he struck a rock. You know, I try to walk gingerly around rocks. Don't want to tick off God.

    Cory Booker: And so I play on the iPad Martin Luther King's final speech. So imagine this in the desert. Four guys standing there and the words of Martin Luther King. I have been to the mountaintop, and I've looked over and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but we as a people will get to the promised land. And he ends the speech, I think with mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. And he predicted his death. And then I tell him, he went to the Lorraine Motel, goes to bed, wakes up, goes on the balcony and is slain. Now Veronica and I get to travel a lot. We were just down in Memphis, and these are the blessings of my life. Because I'd been to this museum before at the Lorraine Motel, but this time as a senator, they come up to me and say, we have some keys, we're going to take you onto the balcony. And when I stepped out on the balcony, I got overcome with emotion and I'm fighting back tears. My- Kevin, who's with us, who's been with me from the beginning, gets on a knee. They tell me there's a line on the pavement of the the trajectory of the bullet that struck King's head. And I just stand there. But at the bottom I know this. I look down to look for it because I want to see it.

    Cory Booker: Because what I said to the men in the desert that if you went to the Lorraine Motel and you stood where King stood and you looked, you would see words from the Torah marking the death of this great American, this great Christian pastor. And the words of the Torah are the were the words from the parsha of that week. And there are a challenge to everyone here, every generation that would come that was not alive, like me and all of you that was not alive when King was alive. And I recited the words of the Torah in that desert, as King's words still seem to be fading into the night. That the words of Joseph's brothers. Who, seeing Joseph proclaim these words before they grabbed him and threw him into a well to die. And the words written, there are. Behold, here cometh the dreamer. Let us slay him, and see what becomes of his dream. That's the question right now. It's the question we have to answer. I think the dream is, like Langston Hughes says, there's a dream in this land with its back against the wall. To save the dream. For one, we must save the dream for all. I'm telling you right now, whatever you do in your life, wherever we go, whatever jobs we have. If you love this country, love her people and be one of the folks that dedicates themselves to saving the dream.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Everyone up.

    Cory Booker: No no no no no no no no.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Let's get a standing ovation.

    Cory Booker: No!

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Everybody up. Everybody up.

    Cory Booker: Too much. Okay. Sit down now. Sit down. All right.

Humbug | Rabbi Shmully Hecht

  • Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Today is a very special day for me. An extremely emotional day. On behalf of the founder, co-founder, of this organization, I want to thank everybody for coming here today.

    Cory Booker: Why the bowling pin?

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Ahh the answer is in a very good film you should all watch. It's called The Big Lebowski. Okay, things have changed since you left.

    Cory Booker: Clearly.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You're back to see the changes. Okay. On behalf again of our founder, Senator Cory Booker, a short 25 years ago. I'd like to thank God for giving us this extraordinary opportunity to get together today with members of the Yale community and welcome everybody to the Anderson Mansion, a new home of Shabtai, our Jewish society here at Yale. My name is Shmully Hecht. And a short 25 years ago, I bumped into a really good looking man at the law school. He's standing to my left.

    Cory Booker: And he was standing next to me.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And we had a dream. So I'm going to let the senator.

    Cory Booker: Didn't we meet on your 21st birthday?

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: That's right. It was my 21st birthday, and was my 21st or my 22nd? I don't know how old I am, so.

    Cory Booker: I think it was your 21st birthday.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: In New York.

    Cory Booker: Yes. Which I thought would enable you to drink. But you had been drinking for many years. Yeah.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I should note they closed the restaurant after that dinner. It was Vabene on Second Avenue in New York. I remember that with actually with Mr. Benny Shabtai, who was kind enough to give us this building for our society, hence the eponymous name of the institution. We started in an apartment in the Taft. We moved to Crown Street. We were there for 20 years. We were fortunate enough to assume this building. We transitioned into an apartment for four years on Chapel Street. Here we are. It's a large space, God willing, will grow into the entire building over time. Sadly, most of our alumni go into politics. Hence the endowment has not yet been fully created. But we're very happy to move between here and the Oval Office. We'll be just fine here on the first floor. Okay. I want to say just a few words about a terrible article that was written in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago by a Brian Rosenthal and Eliza Shapiro, essentially an anti-Semitic diatribe that attacked ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg for being ignorant and taking government funds for their educational system. For those of you who haven't read it, it's a good piece. It's kind of like a Mein Kempf type of piece, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion type of piece, where Jews, grubby Jews, take money from the government and use it at their whims and deprive their children of an education. So I will follow up with that article at another time, probably in the form of a book that I plan to write.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: However, on the notion of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews not being able to read, I thought it was important today to just give you two copies to show everybody two copies of books that I found by a Princeton professor, which are also fantastic book. If you haven't read them, you should, which I'm going to send Brian Rosenthal and Eliza Shapiro. The title of the book I won't mention, but for those of you who can see it, does somebody here want to announce the name of the book. On bullshit. Yeah, so it's a great book. I have one for Brian Rosenthal. I have one for Eliza Shapiro. I will send it to them. To those of us who, thank God are committed to truth and to conversation and to love and peace, I found from the same author his second book, which I'm going to give the Senator today. I bought it on eBay for a dollar. Probably the best dollar I ever spent. I lived in a time when you can get on a train in New York for a dollar. This was about a dollar. For those of you who haven't read it, it's a book for those of us who are by the same author, committed to truth. And so this is my gift to you, Senator Cory Booker, my co-founder, by Harry G. Frankfurt, a professor at Princeton. A book on truth. It's a fantastic read.

    Cory Booker: Are you going to sign it for me.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah.

    Cory Booker: No I'm serious.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah, I'm going to sign. I'm going to sign Frankfurt. Or do you want me to sign Shmully Hecht?

    Cory Booker: I want you to sign Shmully Hecht.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Okay.

    Cory Booker: Because I just want to remember where we got it from. You got to sign and date.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yeah, actually, it's funny, because I've got something else in the bag. I probably should sign it. So, does anybody know today's date? The 23rd of-.

    Cory Booker: October.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: October. Thank you. And we're. What are we? 1996... October 23rd, 2022. To my dearest friend, Cory. With love, Shmully. I don't have to say anything else. You've committed your life to truth. And so that's my gift to you.

    Cory Booker: Thank you.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: On the notion of ultra orthodox Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn. I'm a Queens boy, I should note. But I did go to school and lived in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as a Lubavitcher Hassid my entire life. I thought it would be important just to very shortly comment on the notion that ultra-Orthodox Jews send their kids to schools where they don't learn how to read. So I found this morning on my way here, a book in my library at home, which is fairly extensive, that I received from the senator in 1997, when I was fortunate enough to get to be engaged to my lovely wife, Toby, who is always here with us. Thank God, may she live and be well. We got engaged and I remember actually the senator flying to Seattle, Washington for the wedding, which was extraordinary.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We have photos of that wedding. They're beautiful. And we had a little party, and I remember. Or maybe it was even in the apartment in the Taft. The senator, then Cory Booker,  member of the Yale Law School, said I have a gift for you for the engagement, and you should make sure to read it. So before I show you the book, I just wanted to mention that Toby and I have been blessed, thank God, with seven wonderful children and a wonderful family. And of course our extended family is here in the room with us today, and our extended family goes beyond this building, but through the entire campus. And today has become a network that spans the globe of people that are interested in pursuing truth with love which is why I'm standing next to the senator. And he gave me this book and I want you to know, thank God that I read it, hence the seven children, and I want to thank you for it. So before I tell you what the book is called, I just want to read what it says inside. Or maybe.

    Cory Booker: Oh my gosh.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: So this is- you can read it.

    Cory Booker: Yeah.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Can you read your own handwriting?

    Cory Booker: To the smartest man I know. Congrats on making a brilliant choice. Love, Cory.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Love, Cory. So that's the book. And so to all of us, but particularly to Brian at the Times and Eliza Shapiro, we're doing just fine reading. Okay. Thank you.

Bashert | U.S. Senator Cory Booker

  • Cory Booker: We're taking away time for questions. So anything you guys want to want to bring up, let's let's. I don't know how much time we have. How many questions? So Veronica says 2 or 3. I have agency over my life. Yeah. Yes. She literally controls what time I go to bed, what time I wake up, what I do with my day. She's chief of staff. But when she says things like that, I need to. I need to exercise my agency. That I still am the boss of me. We will do 3 or 4 questions, not 2 or 3. All right, I'm in charge. All right. So we're going to go here to my left, which is the Democrat. Very easy to do. Yes, sir.

     

    Jordan: I'm wondering if there's ever been. Well, I'm sure there has been.

    Cory Booker: What's your name?

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Speak up with questions, please.

    Cory Booker: Yeah. What's your name?

    Jordan: My name is Jordan. I'm a 2L at the law school.

    Cory Booker: Your name is Jordan?

    Jordan: Yes.

    Cory Booker: That's one of my favorite names. It is. If I have a child. If. God, you- You know, Shmully why have a rabbi in your life if they're not going to help you find your bashert. So I don't understand that. So I am still childless, but Abraham was really old when he had a kid, so there's still hope for me. But, Jordan, if I have a child, I want to name them Jordan. I hope it's a daughter, though. But I've thought this all out. I'm like one of these kids, you know, the whole wedding is planned out. You don't even know who you're going to marry yet, anyway. But Jordan is my mother's maiden name. Yes, yes. Okay. Go ahead Jordan.

    Jordan: I'm curious of like, if you could give me an example of when your spirituality has conflicted with, like, necessary policy making or work in the government and how you try to reconcile those differences.

    Cory Booker: That's great. Did you guys hear what he said back in the back? Yeah. He basically said, how is it a man as handsome as you? No. He asked, can you tell about a time that your spirituality may have conflicted with things you were trying to work on, and how did you resolve those conflicts? I honestly don't think there's conflicts. My moral compass has always been my guide. There's definitely been times where I've had to be tough and hard, especially in my mayoral days. But the times I feel like I've done things that didn't resonate with my moral core. I regret that. I feel like I was wrong. You know, I still am haunted by a person I fired. That my then chief of staff and others were saying he did something politically wrong, and it just felt so wrong to me. And I let them fire the person. And to this day that was, you know, 20 years ago, I still or in 2006, I should say, I still regret that. And it did at the time, it didn't resonate with my moral core. And so as I've gotten older, I've listened to that voice inside of me that says what you're being told to do here is wrong. Now, there are times that I'm getting better, like, you know, and I haven't talked about this with my team. Like, I called for somebody to resign that said something stupid and arguably bigoted. Another national figure not in my state said something stupid.

    Cory Booker: And even at the time, my staff was pushing me to get out there and call for this person to resign. And it didn't sit right to me like, this isn't my state, this isn't my turf. This person did something wrong. And I know this is hot debate on campuses like. And it was decades ago. I said stupid, dumb things that could be seen as bigoted 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And so there's- I see all those moments when I'm not listening to my internal sort of voices as Guideposts and when I go the wrong direction. Don't lose the lesson. Learn from them. People who tell me like, there's a lot of political discussion now about, like, I hear this all the time. Well, Democrats, you're too nice. You're like, you don't play hardball. You know, even when I was running for president, people were like, oh, you're just like, I'm like, wait a minute. First of all, there's a movie about me called Street Fight. I fight hard, but why do you have to be mean? Why do you have to be cruel? Why do you have to do immoral things to get to a moral end? To think that's going to get you to a moral end. Because I believe what Gandhi said, that the means and the ends should always align. And so that's what I strive for. Thanks, Jordan. Yes, sir. Two guys, the next two questions have to be two women. Sorry, fellas. Balanced. Go ahead.

    Olu: Yeah. So my name is Olu. I'm at the law school. I was just wondering, you know, I think to be a young person these days is to have lived through, you know, at least two financial crises and what feels like in many ways, kind of, you know, a country coming apart at its seams. You know, the very foundation of democracy itself kind of coming into question. And I guess I was just wondering, how do you remain so kind of positive and optimistic, given this kind of environment. What do you what do you kind of do to sort of make yourself, like, stay hopeful?

    Cory Booker: Look, so first of all, I've learned also to be careful about the stories we tell because yes, I have objective measures that things are, you know, we're in a tough spot. I mean, we're in the gallop keeps a measure of trust. Like, how much do Americans trust each other? How much do they trust their institutions? How much do they trust the media? And we're at the lowest level the Gallup has ever measured. These things bother me because they erode community. But I also know as I travel around the country, I see and because I put this energy out, I often attract these stories. Millions of acts of grace and kindness are going on across aisles, across religions. You know, I saw it in my community when there was an incident at a synagogue that, you know, Muslim communities just trip over themselves to wrap themselves around. I mean, I could go on for hours about these beautiful stories that never get into the national conversation. And so we hear all this noise that makes us think that things are bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. So I'm going to tell you, I'm going to stipulate that I think things are that we have a problem, but I'm also going to say that we all have an obligation to balancing that story out. Like, you know, I have friends that watch the news and suddenly they're worried about Africanized bees like, oh my God, I'm terrified because every day our social media and our traditional media is very much geared towards scaring you.

    Cory Booker: It's very much geared towards telling you the worst story. What I told in the talk I gave yesterday is about Van Jones and and Newt Gingrich had this show called Crossfire, and van was telling me that, you know, I love what Brene Brown says. She says it's hard to hate up close so pull people in. And so the two of them sitting next to each other, realize they liked each other. And they agreed on a lot of things. And they went to their producer and said, let's do a final segment, call it ceasefire. And they did it and only lasted a handful of shows because the they stopped them because they said ratings were going down. So the corporate models of our media are all about how much can I make you watch this screen? I remember one of the reporters from my state's largest newspaper, the Star-Ledger, who said to me, this is the end. They are now paying reporters based upon the click thrus on their article. What is going to kind of articles are they going to write to try to get people like me when I'm doomscrolling at 4:00 in the morning? Y'all been there too? And to make me click through, God, it's going to have to be things that often appeal to the primitive parts of my psyche that.

    Cory Booker: Oh, let me see what that is. Or oh, what is this takedown of this person? Or oh, what is this gossip? Or oh, what is this hate. Oh, what is this moral indignation that's so confirms to me how bad the other side of the aisle is or this figure. So that's all at work right now in our society on steroids. Supercharged. We have no idea. Civilization did not evolve millennia of evolution before we got screens in our lives. This is just a brief, tiny fraction of a second. We don't know what this is doing to us. I have theories about how it's driving anxiety, and I have theories about how it's driving self-hate from self-esteem to am I enough? This enough, that enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, big enough, small enough, whatever. And I have a feeling it's somehow correlated with the highest levels ever of mental health medications that we're taking, depression, anxiety medications. I'm seeing more and more studies about just the light in those hours between, I think 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. are connected to our mood. So all of this stuff is going on in a new toxic brew from the change of corporations. Corporations have changed dramatically from my dad's era to now.

    Cory Booker: Back in my dad's era, corporate philosophies were very different. Their stakeholders were very different. My dad worked for a company called IBM, and it was before this terrible short termism we're in now where, you know, my office looked at CFOs, a survey of them. How many of them have made decisions that are against the long term interests of your corporation just to make quarterly reports look better? 84% said they were doing that. A New York Times had a great article about corporate models and their shift from looking at a janitor that worked for Xerox, big company, my dad's era, to a janitor that works for Apple. The janitor worked for Xerox, worked for Xerox. Therefore, they qualified for their benefits program, their tuition assistance program. They follow that janitor up to the to middle management. The janitor look for Apple. It was a depressing story because that person didn't work for Apple. They worked for a company that was bidding for that contract, pushing down wages as much as they possibly could. And now that worker couldn't do what the other single mother did raise her child to even do better than she did the American Dream. This worker now had to work two jobs, wasn't home to check homework, couldn't go on to get their own education, which they would have. So it's just a different model we have. So I can give you all these inputs that are making this a very insecure, highly tense, zero sum, high stakes kind of culture.

    Cory Booker: And so your question about my staying optimistic. I draw from my own traditions, man. I'm a black guy in America who- my grandmother was born not that far after slavery. The stories of my grandparents, how did they stay optimistic? The stories of my father getting beaten in segregated communities because you step over a line. The stories in my family about the numbers of people being lynched every single day. But I don't even have to go that far back. I live in a low income community. I mean, I think I'm the only senator that lives. I didn't look at the census numbers this time, but the last census below the poverty line. I live in a district, black and brown district, below the poverty line. And you want to talk about heroic people that every day are sources of joy for me. Yet their children have been rounded up for doing things that Yale students do, like smoke, take drugs, use drugs that their lives have been devastated by the reign of violent crime sourced by the weapons that don't come from Newark. You know, I could go on and on and on about, like, the people I find in my community who are dealing with outrageous realities that we seem to be comfortable with.

    Cory Booker: The land of the free, having more incarcerated people than any other country in the world. One out of every three incarcerated women on the planet Earth is in this country. What we do to women in America is Byzantine. We shackle pregnant women, force them into a level where they're literally making their own tampons because they can't afford to buy a tampon and call their child because the user rates we charge them. There is so much things going on yet I meet people in prisons. When I was at Yale, I that's when I first started visiting prisons. Haven't stopped because My Faith Matthew 25, says, show up, be proximate, and I meet these dudes who have life sentences who take joy. That one guy when I was at Yale, I never forget what he said to me. I go, same thing, man. I come in here and you give me energy every day, yet you're behind these bars. What's going on? He goes, Cory, I have purpose. Every day I get up and see one of these knuckleheads because most people go to prison, come out and he goes, I make it my deal to make sure when they leave, I tell them, I never want to see you again, and I've done everything I can to make sure that they don't make the mistakes I did and get on the right track. And that gave him source his joy.

    Cory Booker: So I wake up every single day, man, and I have a choice. I can't, as we said earlier, I can't choose what's going to happen to me in this world. But the two things I have power of is my attitude and my state of expectation. And I believe my faith grounds me so much that I know I have a purpose. Already said it simplify it, is love, which is a two sided purpose. How can I make myself a better instrument of love? By learning the lessons I already told you about my imperfections and mistakes I made. And number two, how can I be a better vessel to shine love into this world? So I wake up every day with a purpose that gives me joy. And then I just say, this universe, everything's happening is for a reason. You and I are having this connection for a reason. And maybe, you know, I can touch you in a way that you'll never come back to Yale again. I mean, come on. I'm joking. Yeah. Brother, there's so much reason to celebrate every single day. And if you're having trouble connecting to that, do what I do sometimes. Just write a journal. Today sucks, but let me give reasons why I should be rejoicing this morning. And every day there's a reason to rejoice and share that. Share that with this world. All right. Thank you. Okay.

    Toby Hecht: Take one more.

    Cory Booker: One more. Oh, you're you're being policed by Veronica. So last, last question right here.

    Veronica: You can ask whoever there's, like, three hands up. We just here?

    Cory Booker: Yeah. Why don't we do that? We'll hear the questions. Look at Veronica trying to take control of my life again. Veronica, I'm going to go here. Veronica, do you have two other people that you had in mind? Okay, so where's the hand here. Who was the hand here? Yes. So you're the third and last question. You're the first, second, third. Just get them out.

    Question: Thank you so much for coming.

    Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Speak up please.

    Question: Thank you so much for coming to speak with us. I had a question. We had the chance to hear from Alan Dershowitz just a few days ago. And one of the things that he described that kind of profoundly affected me was the way that his former friends would walk away from him. And I'm wondering what is a way you're thinking about trying to heal this sort of divisions because, you know, people disagree with one another. Friends disagree with one another. How do how do we forgive people with whom we disagree?

     

    Cory Booker: That's a great question. Okay. Yes, sir.

     

    Question: Thank you. Senator. What's the state of faith in the Senate? Is there a genuine motivation by principles of faith, by your colleagues to act writ large? Or is everything still cynically driven by the news cycle? And perhaps some of the displays of faith by colleagues are not as genuine as they may be.

    Cory Booker: Wow the state of faith in the Senate. Okay. Hold on, hold on. Forgiveness. State of faith. And. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

    Question: It's clear that you see religion as a force of community, but often in the national scale, and especially since Dobbs, I feel like we talk about religion as a source of division. So what role should religion play, if any, in decreasing and not increasing polarization?

    Cory Booker: Last question. Real quick here. Here. Oh, sorry. Here. Yes.

    Question: I have a similar question to the to the Senate one. So I don't hear like any politicians promote a message of love ever. What do you think are the values that are contradicting your message of love that you see in the political system? How do you work against those?

    Cory Booker: Okay, so I'm gonna try to go real quick, maybe reverse order. So, first of all, you don't hear the messages. Like I was told I'd make a lot more money on my emails that I send to people if I was sending more extreme kind of fear based messages like, click here to save the world from devastation and destruction that being caused by Mitch McConnell. You know, so the love messages don't get filtered through our corporate corporations because they don't think they sell as much. You know, I'm proud that I have millions of people following me on social media, and I'm developing a community of that. But it's just I don't think you hear it as much because it's harder to break through than it is. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't stay doing it. And there, by the way, there are other politicians that I believe that on both sides of the aisle that are that do have core of authentic faith. But I think that these things will get more lift if more of us lift them. The one challenge I loved saying to friends and students is do a social media audit of yourself. Like literally go through and look at your last postings for a month to six months and say, is this the energy I want to bring to the universe? Is it? Is it a great exemplification of my spirit? The best of me? And if the answer is no, saying, well, what could I do differently? So my my chief of staff and I know this. I searched the internet for stories about goodness and try to elevate them on my platform. So I think we're in a contest. This story I did this morning for tomorrow for Diwali was all about that contest between dark and light. And you have to decide, am I a light worker or am I just doubling down on the on the darkness? Okay, then it was over here. Remind me again because it.

    Question: Religion and polarization.

    Cory Booker: It's tough. Right? It's tough. And I've tried to really because you talk about Dobbs like, I've really looked for people that I know of that are and had some conversations with people that are really do believe that and are are people I respect and admire that believe that life starts at conception. Now, I've talked to Rabbi friends of mine that Judaism has different views on that, and I've talked to Christian friends of mine who show me biblical texts that affirm my belief. But it's such a polarizing zero sum issue. Right? And it's hard when a person's religious beliefs, it's not like it's a budget battle and we can just do kind of Solomon that thing and cut the baby in half. And so where do you go? And so I'm sorry. That was a terrible metaphor. Terrible terrible benefit. And this is the thing that really bothers me. I'm going to hear about it when I get in the car from my chief of staff. Like she says, you're doing all right, Cory until you talked about King Solomon and splitting the baby. So, I'm not going to change that person's view like I have a lot of love and respect for Senator Langford, a man of faith and principle. There's no bridging that divide between what he believes as a matter of his faith and what I believe is a matter of my faith.

    Cory Booker: But yet we still have found a relationship. And maybe if we start talking, that we can't find a bridge that divide on that but can we bridge a divide on something else? Like, I talk to a lot of my friends who I say to them, well, I look at the States and this is now dated, so somebody might have a better counter factual piece of evidence. But before Dobbs, the state that had lower rates of abortion the most was Colorado. How did they do it? They gave low income women free birth control. So maybe you don't believe you're not going to allow me to let a woman make her own decisions, and we'll have to fight that out electorally. And by the way, I'm not fighting you. I'm fighting more of the people that are sitting on the sidelines that agree with me, that don't vote. That's my bigger battle. But can we agree that states- the evidence shows that states that do certain things lower rates of women making abortions. A woman who has a child in America, I think has, well, let's just say, a dramatically higher rate of falling into severe poverty. We're one of the few states that- nations that allows a woman size up a child, you're going to fall into severe poverty. Can we do something about that together? So I don't dismiss a human being.

    Cory Booker: And that gets me to the question over here. I just can't dismiss a human being completely because if I can keep the cords of our humanity there, there might be some other discovery. So this is to your question. I don't know how to say this in a personal context, because there are a lot of competing values that I have. Like, I want to source my- I want to spend time with people that nurture my soul, that ignite my soul. Whose eyes light up when they see me. I want to nurture a community around me that really that does challenge me, that tells me when I'm being a jerk or when I'm not being the best version of myself. I love this saying, like, you know, find friends who know the song of your heart and remind you of it when you forget the tune and so what if there's a person though that like, has such strong beliefs that behind me, should I divorce that person in my life to save my own sanity sometimes? That's a tough value. I know I like my friends who challenge me, who have differing views that sharpen my views, but so I don't know what to tell you to do in your personal life. It's distressing to me that we have families can't even have Thanksgiving dinner because they get or they make rules.

    Cory Booker: We can't talk about this or it's going to descend. But professionally, I don't understand people that can't talk to people that disagree with them. And my favorite story about this  is a story I told yesterday again as well. But it's my favorite moment where, Inhofe, who was a conservative senator from Oklahoma who is now retiring in office, said things to me that I find deeply difficult to deal with. Like he's a guy, I think, that believes you could pray away the gay. You know, he's a very Christian family and has alluded to things like that on the Senate floor. He's the guy that brought the snowball to the Senate floor to say that it wasn't climate change going on and yeah. So but I'm sure there are things that I have said, whether the stupid things I've said that probably deserve a little bit of laughter or even some of the principal stands I take, like the joke I made at yesterday was like, I'm sure I've said things that have I'm sure I've offended Senator Inhofe, I'm a vegan, for crying out loud. So if I just let those things and the people whip that stuff up, regardless if he says something or I say something, our our tribes whip that stuff up so we become caricatures and one dimensional people.

    Cory Booker: We're the only nexus people have often to us are the stupid thing we said or the thing we disagree with, and we lose our humanity. So in off, I decided to go to his office for Bible study and, as an attempt to connect. And when I went to his office, I walk in and the first thing I see that sort of surprised me. That challenged my implicit bias. And if you don't think you have implicit biases, you're wrong. I have implicit biases. My implicit bias is this right wing conservative senator wouldn't have a picture prominently featured of him and a little black girl, and I don't call my older senators by their first name. I said, Mr. Chairman, who dat? And he's basically- his family adopted this little girl out of a very, very difficult situation. It was a beautiful story. Months later, there's a big education bill going through the Senate, and I've now gotten to know him well. We have a good relationship. We just sat next to each other at a meal at a bipartisan lunch that Senator Coons helped to put together. And I see him in the well of the Senate as this education bill is going through, the rule is no amendments on this bill. They were not letting them because it could sink the bill. Lamar Alexander was the manager of the bill and the well of the Senate trying to keep everything together.

    Cory Booker: Everybody thought this was just going to pass. My team had this really great idea of an amendment that would help homeless kids and foster kids. But there was literally we thought, no chance. Every amendment is being blocked. There's no way you can do it. But I see in often the well of the Senate, and I just feel the spirit of him and his daughter and this child and I go into the well of the Senate and I say, Senator Inhofe, I have an amendment. And I talked to him about it, and he listened. And then when I finished, I thought he was going to say, Cory, this bill is not going to have any amendments on it. He goes, let me think about this. And I walked back to my side of the aisle and sit in the back seats where, you know, again, I've got the one job in America where I can feel really young at my age. And I sit down and I look up and he's marching towards me into the Democratic section on the floor and comes up to me and just sort of gruffly says, I'm in, and then turns around. And I'm like, Senator, what does that mean? And he's like, Cory, it means I'm going to co-sponsor your amendment. So I had a powerful chairman do it.

    Cory Booker: We got Grassley next, another powerful chairman. And before you knew it, Lamar Alexander accepted the amendment as the law of the land. And so imagine that right now, if I was firmly not looking for those human connections, this opportunity, which is my purpose in life, to help the people who are vulnerable, wouldn't have happened if I was firm. But because I opened the doors to see his multidimensional humanity, we affirmed what always exists. Every human being has tight cords of connections. We just have this delusion that there's nothing about that person that connects me to their humanity. But because I did that and I affirmed, what's the truth is, is that we all are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a common garment of destiny, that we found a way to help people, that. But for that one human connection, praying together, or studying the Bible together would, would not have happened. And so that's what my prayer is. That's how it's a tough balance, because Veronica knows this. I get home on some days and I just can't deal. I just need folks to make me laugh and forget about the world for a while. But, I know that I'm enriched and challenged when I open those door to those chords. The last question I didn't get to who was the person?

    Toby Hecht: Right here?

    Cory Booker: Yeah. It was here. Right. I think I got the one behind me, I got, I got okay. Yes. So your question was, I think, one of the best summaries of all the things we just talked about, which was in the Senate, the people of faith. So I'm sorry, like, I've met some of the most faithful people I have met are atheists. Really. Some of those moral people I know are atheists. Like this idea that you profess your religion and you're ascribing to a religion, but nothing I witness. And again, you're a multifaceted human being, but it shows me your religion. I always say before you tell me about your religion, first show it to me and how you treat other people. You know, before you tell me about how much you love your God. Show it to me about how much you love her children. And so I, I don't know what it is. I have a trigger. And I've told you I need to work on my triggers. But religious hypocrisy is one of my great triggers. You know, people who profess their faith but then do cruel, mean horrible things to other people. And so I don't judge often the faith of a person by them professing it. You know, some of my friends in the Senate are people like Mike Lee and Langston Hughes, who I told you about.

    Cory Booker: Yeah, one's a Mormon. One's a devout Christian. But to me, I see their faith more by how they treat the people who work the doors in the Senate. You know, how do they treat their colleagues when nobody's watching? How do they talk about people when they don't think they're listening to them? And so I struggle with religiosity in America. You know, I'm a Christian and sometimes I just hear people are reading in their Bible, their own political beliefs, you know, they warp their religion around. And this is terribly judgmental, but it just seems they warp their religion around meanness. And the Bible talks about my family. The Bible has been used to justify racism, slavery, misogyny, anti LGBTQ policies. So I try to be somebody that connects in the Senate around issues of goodness and decency and mercy and love, and there is people on both sides of the aisle, as imperfect as we all are, that aspire, ultimately to that. And I'll end with this. Look, it's weird, guys, to be back here and to be a United States senator. Maybe Shmully had these ideas for my life, but I would have laughed at you if you told me that, hey, you're going to. In less than two decades, after leaving Yale, you're going to be a United States senator. I'd be like, just no blanking way.

    Cory Booker: But, you know, life is about purpose, not position. And so it's like the toughest question I think we all have to ask ourselves. This is why I've kept journals over the years. It's like, okay, blank page, why am I here? Why am I on this earth? Like, what are my guiding principles? What are my values? I had a conversation with a friend who has kids now, and she says, I'm going to do that exercise. Like, what does this family stand for? What are our core values? If you can't articulate your core values, what makes you think in those complicated moments of life, you're going to be able to make an easy decision. Like life has become very easy for me when I have complete value clarification, because I know that isn't in accordance with my values and I don't do that. Or as I'm rushing along the path of life, one of my values is I should. As much as that goal is important to me, I need to stop and engage here because my values tell me to do that. So I have on my wall in the Senate a map of the central ward of Newark, New Jersey. It's where I was first elected as a city council person. I graduated in 97, had a great plan for myself to start a nonprofit. By the spring of 98, I'm a city councilman.

    Cory Booker: I'm a politician. The dark one out. I went to politics. I thought I was going to be running nonprofits for my life. And I ran and knocked on doors and told people why I was running, why I was getting politics. I had clarity on that. And I keep that map up in the Senate so that every time I look at it, I'm grounded in that life purpose and I don't depart from it. And so religion is so important. I wish my party had a better way of talking about faith. I sometimes wish more politicians that are Democrats didn't let faith be a purview of people on one side of the aisle, and not just the other, and I and again, I again remember what I said. I think that some of the most faithful spiritual, moral people I know are atheists, but I wish we had a spiritual language and a better faithful language in our public discourse. But at the end of the day, the purpose of humanity, in my opinion, is not to get everybody to ascribe to the same religious beliefs as a black Christian who founded a Jewish organization. There's got to be a bigger goal here, a bigger purpose for humanity. Because as much as I think a lot about my own morals, values and purpose to try to guide my life, fail every day by them, I think we have common cause and a common purpose in humanity.

    Cory Booker: I think it's the reason why in that desert, two Americans, two Israelis, three white guys, a black guy, Jews, Christians, why we felt a oneness in that moment. I think it's why this experiment called America, which from its founding was diverse. Why we have captured the imagination of humanity as well as generations of Americans. And so, my dream I leave you with, that dream, I think, evidenced at the Lorraine Motel, the dream of my greatest hero, whose statue sits on my desk, Harriet Tubman, who loved this country, was willing to die for it. The dream of immigrants, many of whom are in this room. I think that's the binding purpose. And my hope is that those values at the core of that purpose win out at a time that I see them flickering a bit, and the only way they win is not hoping for it, not praying for it, not wishing for it, not waiting for someone else to do it. The only way is that when you open up that book, tell yourself that this is my morals, this is my values. But I've inherited way too much from this country not to understand that I have to pay forward something and that I'm going to be a part of making the light, the torch of America, not flicker, but burn brighter in this world. Thanks, everyone.

    Toby Hecht: I didn't get a chance to meet you. I'm sorry. My name is Toby Hecht and I'm married to Shmully. I'm one of the directors here at Shabtai.

    Cory Booker: A woman of great mercy and charity. She allowed that man to marry her?

    Toby Hecht: Yes. Madhuri. I first met Cary at my engagement party in February of, let's see, 1997. Yep. And, Cory, you. There's a reason why we're all here today to see you. People have rearranged their schedules because you are still who you were when I first met you. And, the spirit continues to has come with us from Crown Street to this building through the apartment that we were in temporarily. Never leaves. Your soul is still here. And I just want to thank you again for coming. And I hope to I don't know where your future will go. I mean, I have visions, but God willing, but I just-.

    Cory Booker: Married and children. Is that?

    Toby Hecht: Some of the things.

    Toby Hecht: Maybe big white House somewhere. But I just want to thank you all for being here, and I think it's important that we had these conversations today. Cory, you answered a lot of questions that I think people are grappling today here on campus, and possibly this generation really doesn't have very many answers for the questions that were asked. And I think that you gave us something really compelling to think about. I can tell by the faces in this group here, that this was an incredible, extraordinary morning. And I want to thank you for that personally, because I've been here we've been living here for 20, almost 26 years now. And this is probably one of the most powerful events, I think, that I've been at where you have actually just you've crystallized the feelings, the emotions, the struggles, the loneliness that people are feeling in this generation. And that's priceless. So thank you so much. And I want to thank also your team, amazing team. And who's not here.