"Who is more meshuga?" Newark Mayor Cory Booker asked a packed Metcalf Auditorium last night, using the Hebrew word for "crazy."
The question began a dialogue sponsored by Hillel between Booker and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach on positive social change. Booker is currently serving his second term as mayor, and Boteach has written 27 best-selling books on topics ranging from relationships to spirituality.
Booker encouraged the crowd to ask any questions, whether they be about Booker's "time at Yeshiva" or "Shmuley's football career in college" — in reality, Booker played football at Stanford University while Boteach studied at the Jewish institution.
"If you had asked me when I was 22 years old, ‘Would I ever in my life not only be sitting up here with an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi'" or be "the first in the history of humanity to be the black goy president of a chabad house, I would've thought that you were really crazy," Booker said.
But that is just what happened. In 1992 at Oxford University, a woman invited Booker to the L'Chaim Society for dinner.
"Is there something caught in your throat?" he said he thought when she invited him. But meeting women at the time "was like the Holy Grail," he added, so he accepted the offer. The house resembled a scene from "Yentl," with men wearing black hats and clothed by "terrible tailors," he said. All of a sudden, everyone at the party turned to look at him. He said he could tell they were thinking, "What is this large black man doing here?" He said he thought the same thing.
Though out of his comfort zone, Booker decided to stay for dinner and was seated next to Rabbi Boteach. After having a long conversation, the two began to exchange books to learn about each other's cultures. Booker recommended "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," while Boteach suggested "Night" by Elie Wiesel. Soon, Boteach asked Booker to be the co-president of the Oxford L'Chaim Society.
"Now I see you are downright meshuga," Booker said to the Rabbi. But Booker agreed and became one of the first non-Jewish presidents of a Jewish student organization.
Booker and Boteach bonded immediately over a conversation on tolerance, Booker said.
"Tolerance is the floor, but love is the ceiling," he added. "If we keep dividing each other along racial, religious (and) political lines, we will never manifest the strength necessary to advance this nation to its calling."
Booker described a recent trip to the Israeli desert, where he saw the top of Mount Nebo, the place where Moses came to see the promised land, even though he knew he could not enter. This generation, Booker said, will go further than Moses did.
"On this college campus is the Joshua generation," said Booker. "The generation of my parents did not get this nation to the promised land. They got it to the mountaintop."
Boteach began his section of the talk by discussing Martin Luther King, "someone who took the ancient Jewish tradition and made it a modern manifesto of freedom," he said. "He gave pride to my people, the likes of which we had never experienced before."
Boteach was so influenced by King that he took his children on a road trip to Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn., to see the place where King gave his famous "Mountaintop" speech.
"If you ever want to know what purgatory is," Boteach said, "shove nine kids in a tin can called an RV."
The Rabbi called King a prophet, and he emphasized "the ability of people to go beyond tolerance, to go beyond putting up with difference and actually feeling enriched by difference."
Boteach said the problem in America is that we despise the other side more than we love who we are. He said the message of one political party is often that the other is destroying America.
The population is "sick and tired of partisanship for partisanship's sake," Booker said. "I believe no side of our political spectrum has a monopoly on good ideas."
"I am now a believer that there is nothing we cannot do as a people in this country. It is no longer a matter of can we. It is a matter of, ‘Do we have the collective will?'" Booker added.
"The idea that we can all work together for higher goals — how can we make that message sexier?" Boteach asked.
"You and I shouldn't be giving it," Booker replied.
