As Sen. Cory Booker broke the record for the longest Senate speech and made clear he was going for 25 hours, Jewish social media lit up with jokes.
“This is the closest Cory Booker will get to experiencing Yom Kippur,” tweeted Sami Sage, the co-founder of Betches Media, in one representative post.
As Jews do on Yom Kippur, Booker fasted during his entire Senate speech, consuming only a few sips of water. He also apologized for his and his party’s errors that allowed Donald Trump to retake the presidency.
And with the help of his Democratic colleagues, he also echoed the Yom Kippur experience of stretching out prayer so that it fills all of the time until the Jewish holiday ends — also after 25 hours, coincidentally.
Or perhaps there was no coincidence. Booker spent part of last Yom Kippur at IKAR, the nondenominational Los Angeles congregation founded by Rabbi Sharon Brous, who herself has delivered noted sermons in defense of democracy. There, he offered his own rendition of the Prayer for Our Country that included lines he repeated from the Senate floor.
We reached out to Brous to hear what she made of Booker’s speech on Monday and Tuesday, which Booker concluded with a call to make “good trouble” in opposing the aggressive conservative agenda of the Trump administration. (He also made several Jewish allusions.)
Here’s what she said:
Senator Booker spoke at IKAR this past Yom Kippur morning— it was 6 minutes of straight fire. Now it’s clear that he could have easily taken us all the way through Neilah without so much as a bathroom break!
In all seriousness, to preach for 25 hours requires not only fierce passion and preternatural endurance, but a true sense of purpose. The physical feat is impressive, but it’s not the point. We’d do well to consider why Sen. Booker felt such prophetic urgency in issuing this call in this moment.
Rav Kook wrote that when the heart callouses to cruelty, we must, periodically, suspend the normal. May we all find the fortitude to break through the inertia and hopelessness of our time and take a stand for our democracy and for our shared future.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.