Ashton Kutcher at the Senate. Photo: Screenshot.

Actor Ashton Kutcher recounted a Talmudic tale on Wednesday after testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during an informal hearing on human trafficking.

“[B]eing here today, I was reminded of a story a friend of mine told me about a rabbi named Hillel, who was asked to explain the Torah while standing on one leg. And he said, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself. Everything else is just commentary,’” Kutcher, a longtime student of Kabbalah, told Committee Chairman Senator Bob Corker.

Kutcher– who was at the session as the co-founder of the initiative “Thorn: Tech Innovation to Fight Child Sexual Exploitation,” which he established in 2009 with his then-wife actress Demi Moore – got the story slightly wrong, but his sentiment was received in the spirit in which it was clearly intended.

The actual tale is about the sage Hillel who was approached by a gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism, but only on condition that a rabbi would teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective convert, stood on one leg.

Rabbi Hillel said to the man, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this; now go and study it.”

Kutcher, who is not Jewish, has visited Israel many times. In 2013, he called the country “near and dear to my heart,” saying that going there was like “coming back to the source of creation.”

Watch Kutcher’s statement below: