Passover is here and one word keeps coming to my mind: dayenu. Translated from Hebrew as “enough,” dayenu is the song Jews around the world sing at their Seder tables as they recount the story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt.
Three generations ago, my great grandparents left unlivable conditions in their shtetl in Poland and took the biggest risk of their lives: coming to America. Living in the Lower East Side at the turn of the century was far from luxurious. They lived 5 people to a bedroom in a crowded tenement building without indoor plumbing. But they did what they had set out to do: change their fates and afford their children chances they never had in pogrom-plagued Eastern Europe.
Living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, I find myself struggling to imagine the kind of future that my great-grandparents built when they first arrived on the Lower East Side. Every day that we don’t take dramatic climate action is a day in which we inch closer to climate catastrophe. It’s hard to imagine that I am living in the self-described “greatest city in the world.
Our leaders have a responsibility to make fossil fuel companies and polluting corporations—not taxpayers—foot the bill for the damage they have caused by passing the Superfund Act. And they have an obligation to pass the HEAT Act so that their constituents can afford their utility bills as we make the transition to renewable energy. These two projects are not contradictory. They are codependent.