Testimony in favor of Intro 2317
November 17, 2021
Rabbi Hody Nemes
Jewish Climate Action Network NY
I’m Rabbi Hody Nemes, a co-founder and co-leader of Jewish Climate Action Network NYC, a group of New York Jews of many backgrounds, ages, and opinions who agree on one thing: we must act on climate change now. We stand upon the teachings, laws, and prophetic voices of Jewish tradition.
I’m here today because of my wife. On the night of September 1st, I thought she was going to die.
My wife is a pediatric emergency room doctor. Hurricane Ida was raging that night. But sick kids at the hospital needed her, so she went out into the storm.
She called me soon after leaving our house, frightened. She was on the Major Deegan and floodwaters were rising around her. Her car stalled twice. The waters kept rising, and rising. She called 911 and 311, but no one answered. For two hours, we wondered if she would survive. At home with our young children, I prayed. When EMTs finally rescued her, I cried. The car was lost, but my wife was saved.
She was lucky. Tragically, over fifty people died that night, in a storm that was certainly turbocharged by climate change.
I’ve studied climate change for years, but this was the first time it threatened my family directly. I finally understood that climate change can come for any one of us. We may not be the “stranger, the orphan, or the widow” right now, but we might be tomorrow.
That’s why we, like our partners in #GasFreeNYC, ask you to pass Intro 2317 this session. And to strengthen it, by (a) making it take effect in one year, not two, and (b) amending its text to ensure it more clearly covers gut renovations.
I’m not only afraid of drowning in storms, I’m afraid of suffocation. As an ER doctor, my wife has seen countless children threatened by asthma, particularly children from the South Bronx. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute’s estimate, more than 1,000 New Yorkers are killed annually by building pollution in this city.
That’s 1,000 New Yorkers too many.
Jewish tradition is obsessed with saving lives, from the very first chapters of Genesis onwards. In the words of our theologian Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, “The Torah’s central value — expressed in ritual and ethics — is to increase life and the quality of life in every act that we do.”
I ask you today - remember the people who died in Ida, remember the thousand choking to death on our air pollution, remember my wife terrified for her life.
Pass this bill.