Climate activism as an expression of Jewish spirituality

Emily Koester recently won a victory for the Make Polluters Pay law in Massachusetts by successfully introducing a supporting resolution in her town of Greenfield. We spoke to her briefly about how the process unfolded.

Getting the resolution passed was all very easy.

I’m part of the Western Massachusetts Dayenu Circle, which has been around for a long time – about as long as Dayenu. We started in 2021.

I live in Greenfield, a small town in western Massachusetts, but folks come from across the region. I am a member of Temple Israel Greenfield. There are several others who are members of Congregation B’nai Israel and Beit Ahavah, both of which are in Northampton, and some from the Jewish Community of Amherst as well.

Most of the time we meet online, but once a year we meet in person. Of course when we are planning actions, those happen in person.

We’ve done a variety of actions. In 2022, we rallied outside the Bank of America in Amherst, as part of the All Our Might effort to get them to move money out of fossil fuels. We brought the Climate T’shuvah message to our synagogues during the High Holy Days in 2023, and we’ve done a bunch of phone banking as well.

This year, we’ve made the Make Polluters Pay campaign in Massachusetts a big priority for us. Rachel Mandelbaum (Dayenu’s campaign manager) put us in touch with the person organizing around it in Massachusetts, Rachael Boyce.

I met both of them in person at the JCAN conference in Massachusetts this year. Rachael Boyce and I talked about the logistics of how to pass the resolution at the city level.

Rachael shared information around the law, such as the draft resolution for towns. We each had to consider how we would engage with it – and it varied by town.

For example, some towns had already passed it. Northampton – known as being a progressive stronghold – had passed the resolution in support. The Northampton folks in our Circle wrote letters to their city council people to thank them for passing it. 

And all of our state representatives and senators are co-sponsors of the bill. So that piece of work didn’t need to happen.

However, in my town – with just 17,000 people – nothing had happened yet. And since I’m the only Dayenu activist in town, it was up to me.

I got a new councilwoman in July (the former one resigned), and I happened to know her. So I messaged her and I said, “Hey, can you bring this resolution before the city council?” And I sent her the information that Rachael Boyce had shared with me.

And she said, “I’m totally behind it. Let me figure out how to do that. I’ll get back to you.”

She brought it before the appropriate committee. And amazingly, there was a news reporter at that committee meeting. He put in the paper that this was going to be brought forward.

When my councilwoman messaged to say it was going to be voted on in the August meeting, I messaged a bunch of Greenfield folks to come to the meeting with me.

And then I spoke during the hearing. There were a number of contentious items on the agenda that night. But as I was sitting there, the president of the council passed by my seat and said, “Oh, your thing is going to go through.”

I stayed at the meeting for two hours, but I had a really early morning meeting the next day, so I left before they voted on it.

It wasn’t until the paper came out that I found out that it had passed. Overall, there were two articles in the newspaper about it – one before the vote and then one when it passed.

A woman who lives in Hadley is working on bringing it to her town meeting. And a woman in Amherst is encouraged by my success and wants to bring it to Amherst.

Now we need to figure out how to support it at the state level. We just heard there’s 90 days for public comments.