(RNS) — When he finally surrendered the floor of the U.S. Senate after 25 hours of blistering denunciations of the Trump administration, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker had done more than shatter the record for longest speech in the chamber’s history. He resuscitated America’s hope for an intervention.
Some praise the senator’s daylong testimony as a heroic — even “holy” — offensive against American tyranny, pointing to Booker’s invocations of the Hebrew prophets to civil rights icon John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman and Baptist minister. Others dismissed Booker’s speech as empty — even hypocritical — as, for all his dudgeon against the Republicans, he failed to reckon with the broader evils of American imperialism.
It’s no surprise that his near-jeremiad (Jeremiah himself would’ve spared no feelings) got mixed reviews. The praise and the criticism, however, aren’t mutually exclusive, and we do well to appreciate all of its dimensions.
Booker culled fire from the Jewish and Black prophetic traditions to speak truth to power — but only as much heat as the Senate walls could bear.
In his book “The Prophetic Imagination,” Walter Brueggemann says the prophet has two jobs: to critique power and to give people hope. The Hebrew prophets took their rulers to task for the injustices of their day, aiming to energize a weary public with visions of a better future. Booker did both in his protest: He slammed the Trump administration’s “reckless” assault on American institutions, the obscene political influence of Elon Musk and the draconian measures taken against migrants. The stress Booker took on to deliver that message — standing and speaking for over a day without food or rest — gave a petrified public a charge of possibility.
There’s the sense in which Booker was positively performative — the inspiring sense, as when a basketball player soars over the heads of his opponents or Michael Jackson performed his moonwalk. The Hebrew prophets were performers, even if many of their performances went ignored. Jeremiah walked the streets of Jerusalem with an ox yoke on his shoulders to announce that Nebuchadnezzar would conquer the kingdom of Judah. Isaiah — whom Booker quoted in his speech — went about naked for three years prophesying the Assyrian invasion. Ezekiel laid on his side around a model of Jerusalem for 40 days to illustrate the coming divine punishment.
Performance, for the sake of justice, may be necessary. Booker’s impressive physical feat of standing and preaching for 25 hours sits well within that tradition of prophetic performance. But while he reached for the prophet’s mantle, Booker fell woefully short of the tradition by refusing to extend his critique to American imperialism. He wore a yellow ribbon on his lapel in honor of Israeli hostages — even mentioning one by name — but failed to condemn the U.S.-backed devastation of Gaza. His lapse was noted by Christ at the Checkpoint, a Palestinian Christian organization, whose Instagram post read, “Speaking for 25 Hours? Palestinians have been SPEAKING for 77 Years.”
His silence isn’t mysterious. Booker has always voiced strong support for the state of Israel and has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies for pro-Israel policies. In 2019, he was the only Democratic co-sponsor of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which aimed to criminalize participation in boycott/divestment/sanctions campaigns. In previous statements, Booker has backed a definition of antisemitism that conflates it with critiques of Zionism.
While he attacked the administration, Booker also made appeals to the same myth of American innocence that the administration leans on. Though he railed against the “Disneyfication” of U.S. history, he whitewashed history by pegging the current national crisis on Donald Trump. The truth is, we are in crisis because of the foundations of this country. The United States was cultivated in the soil of oppression — of genocide, enslavement and exploitation. The fascism flourishing in the United States today isn’t a pest attacking the plant, but the fruit itself.
The way to change it isn’t just to change the president, or a few laws here and there, but to change the system itself. The Black prophetic acknowledges this most clearly when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told NBC in 1967, “I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”
The truth the Hebrew prophets were compelled to deliver transcended the bounds of national allegiance — even national preservation. Jeremiah’s prophecy about the coming destruction at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar chafed at those who believed the founding promises of the Judean kingdom prevented them from critique or accountability: that the land was theirs, that they were God’s special possession among all other nations, and that God dwelt among them in the temple. For preaching that message, Jeremiah was charged with treason, arrested and thrown into a well.
No American politician is willing to critique the United States to that extent. They know they’d face a modern form of the same fate. Prophets who work in the capital aren’t free to speak of the nation’s greatest sins and speak of total transformation. They’d lose their jobs.
Booker’s speech, hemmed in by imperial commitments, was aimed at stirring the hearts of the American people, but not the foundations of American society. His act may be commended, and his call to take a stand should be heeded. But we’re going to have to go further than he was willing to go.