Cory Booker: “I would like to rise and join some of my colleagues in speaking about Ben Cardin, but I perhaps want to take a little…”

“I would like to rise and join some of my colleagues in speaking about Ben Cardin, but I perhaps want to take a little bit more of a personal approach to sharing my thoughts about my departing colleague. I don't know if he remembers this, but I was elected in a special election, and I came here plopping down, sworn in on the auspicious day of Halloween. And I knew I had to meet my colleagues, so I started the process of going to their offices. They took me to meet everybody from John McCain sitting in his office, obviously, to Harry Reid who was here then. But my journey to go see Ben Cardin was different than any of my other meetings because we sat down, and he asked me about myself, and before I knew it, we were talking about Judaism. Now, it was an amazing conversation to me because I did not realize how deep his faith was, how knowledgeable he was of the Torah, something I have been studying for decades as a non-Jew, and I found this incredible connection to him around the principles that he spoke about at the top of his speech, principles of hesed, principles of tzedakah, this idea of living a good and moral life. But what was amazing to me over these last 11 years that I have been at the Senate is that maybe some joking from time to time about Judaism, but we really haven't had much of a Torah discussion as we did on that very first day. He has never invited me to a minyan; he and I have never prayed together. He never talked to me about his religion.…”