Bryan Schwartzman: From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. Mira Wasserman: Medical science, listening to the insights of medical experts, actually is a Jewish value. Goes way back to antiquity. Bryan Schwartzman: I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman and our guest today is Rabbi Mira Beth Wasserman. We'll be discussing her Evolve essay "Against Apocalyptic Ethics: Human Responsibility Before, During, and After a Pandemic". We'll also be discussing "Jewish Values and the Coronavirus", a resource created by the Center for Jewish Ethics, which Wasserman directs. So the Evolve essay peers deeply into the fissures, exposed by COVID-19 and the human response, particularly here in the US where things have not gone well. Wassermann argues that rather than try to come up with the most ethical ways to allocate scarce medical resources, a true devotion to ethics calls for a radical restructuring of healthcare, and society at large, so we're not having to choose between which patient lives and which patient dies, or which receives better care and which doesn't. "Jewish Values and the Coronavirus" explores Jewish values related to COVID-19, and offers communities a framework to make collective ethical decision-making. Bryan Schwartzman: As a reminder, all of the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, which is Evolve.ReconstructingJudaism.org. The essays are not required reading for this show, but we recommend checking them out. Okay, let's get to our guest, my friend and colleague at Reconstructing Judaism, Rabbi Mira Beth Wasserman. Rabbi Wasserman is the director of the Center for Jewish Ethics and assistant professor of rabbinic literature at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Her book, "Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities" looks at what it means to be human, according to the rabbis who wrote the Talmud. Mira is a go-to speaker on Jewish ethics and the #Me-Too movement. And as the director of the Center for Jewish Ethics, she instituted a collaborative effort to deploy text study in the prevention of abuse. So with that, I'm thrilled to welcome to this digital space, Rabbi Mira Beth Wasserman. Welcome. Welcome to the podcast. How are you? Mira Wasserman: I'm good. It's good to be with you. I feel like every time I say I'm good, I have to like asterisk it and say like, we are in the midst of a global pandemic, and it feels like the world as we know it is shutting down. And climate change is closing in and we have a crazy person in the White House, and I'm doing just fine. Thanks for asking, how are you? Bryan Schwartzman: Yeah, I think all things considered... I was saying we scheduled this over the summer before I realized my kids would be here on this day doing virtual learning. And it's a little chaotic in the house but I'm good. Listeners, if somebody... A nine year old bursts in and says something, don't be surprised. We're going to start off by talking about your essay and also delve into the Jewish Ethics Center resource you've created. So talking about the "Against Apocalyptic Ethics" essay, I just want to start and ask what led you to write this piece and kind of where were you emotionally, spiritually when you sat down to write? Mira Wasserman: Yeah, the piece, is a big piece for me in that it brings together a lot of threads of my thinking from before the pandemic. And we've heard those so much, like one thing the pandemic has done is made a lot of things that were always there below the surface, even more so. So one theme in my thinking and writing about Jewish ethics before the pandemic, was that ethics shouldn't be reserved for special people and special times and special places. I'm really much more interested in ethics in everyday life, everyday practice, everyday people. And then when the pandemic struck, there were these ethics pieces that were being published in a lot of newspapers or radio spots, they would bring in an ethicist to talk about the ethics of the moment. Mira Wasserman: And it really just bugged me how you needed to bring in expertise to talk about these sort of high stress, urgent situations. It seems to me that ethics should be folded in to everything we do, pandemic or not. So that was the initial spur to write something. But it's against apocalyptic ethics. It's also against expertise ethics. I think ethics is just a condition of living. It's something in our everyday lives. So hopefully everybody is thinking about ethics, and everyone's making ethical decisions or decisions that have ethical import all the time. Bryan Schwartzman: Yeah, I guess I'll first start at the everyday. I mean I want to get to the medical stuff and the news, but sort of the everyday… I mean, it seems like everything we do nowadays is a risk assessment. Is this safe? Is that safe? Can my kids play here? Can I go shopping? Can my parents come over for dinner? Do we have to sit outside? I mean, is this risk assessment or is this ethics? And if so, where is there a difference? Mira Wasserman: That's a really great question. You're right. What this moment has done is sort of raise the stakes of every decision that we make. So we decide, am I going to go grocery shopping or not all the time, but there were never stakes to it the way... Although they're probably always were, we just weren't thinking about it. In terms of climate change, there are always stakes to how far we drive, or if we get things delivered, or where those things are sourced from, or what kind of labor allowed us to have those things. So everything was always — always had ethical import. We just weren't thinking about it so much, but the question of risk is interesting. I mean, I think assessing risk alone is an ethical process because this is one thing that we bring out in the Ethics Center guides to Jewish Values in the Coronavirus, medical science, listening to the insights of medical experts, actually is a Jewish value. Mira Wasserman: It goes way back to antiquity that the rabbis, who were quite convinced of their own expertise on Jewish law, also recognized the limits of their expertise, and they would defer to medical experts of their time on questions of if someone's life or health was at stake. They'd bring in the experts and let them decide in this case, oh no, this person should eat on Yom Kippur because it's a matter of health. And in fact, in lots of cases, they would defer to the actual person. So a risk assessment is an ethical decision on its own, because health and safety and life are Jewish values. But I like to think of it is more complicated than that. Because in any decision, there's not only the risk to myself, but there's also the risk to others. And that's where a more complicated nuanced ethics has to come in. I can translate that to the everyday a little better. Bryan Schwartzman: You've said you've made in the last week, five or six, ethical decisions related to everyday life. Is there an example you have, or... Mira Wasserman: Yeah, I can talk about this all day. So the other day... So I should say that in my school district, as of now, I say as of now, because there've been so many shifts. But as of now, my eighth grader has been home so far all year, but the plan is for the hybrid plan to start next week. So I was walking around the neighborhood. I saw another parent of one of my son's kids who is... And everybody has the option of doing the hybrid or staying remote. So we pretty much decided that he'll go to school the two days a week that the hybrid plan allows for. And the big decision that we had to make was about if we take the school bus, or if I drop him off. And normally I'd be like a big fan of the school bus, both because I don't want to, you know, fossil fuel concerns. Mira Wasserman: And also because I commute to work myself and I've never been home for the right hours to get my kid to school, but now I can drive him. And I actually talked to his doctor because he has asthma. And the doctor was really concerned about his exposure, and was like, "Just drive him." Because the classroom is going to be safer in terms of the space and the kids in there, than the school bus. So that was our decision. I felt fine about it. And then I saw this other parent and I told her our plan and she said, "Oh, I can't drive my kid to school. So he was going to take the bus, but your doctor doesn't think that's safe?" And initially I was just sort of overwhelmed by the self-consciousness about my own privilege. And what does it mean that I have this opportunity to protect my kid and my neighbor doesn't? Mira Wasserman: So I said, "Well, maybe, I don't know how you'd feel, but I could drive him." And I said it, and then I thought, well, wait, am I... Even as it came out of my mouth, I was like, am I undermining the doctor's good advice about limiting exposure? And I thought, oh, well, it's still better than the school bus. And then she said, "Well, probably a lot of people will be driving and that will make the school bus a lot safer. So just by driving your son, you're helping us out too." Which was very generous of her to take away my self-consciousness. But actually I thought there was like a great ethical insight in there, which is that it's a mistake in these times to make like we're all the same. We all have different levels of risk and we all have different opportunities and wherever we can relieve systems, we're actually helping, not just ourselves, but other people. Mira Wasserman: So that is somewhat of a rationalization to make me feel better. But it also is saying that if you have the means to take yourself out of the public, there are people who don't get to make that choice because they're essential workers, or because they have economic pressures. I mean, they have to keep taking public transit. So I thought that was a good principle, that if I don't need to take the bus better to stay home, so the people who actually have to take the bus can. Now driving is a little more complicated, but that's an example of these complicated calculations that every mundane decision. Bryan Schwartzman: Let me follow up and ask, is a rationalization by nature unethical? I mean, when we're in impossible decisions, when we don't know what the right thing is, is at least latching on to something that sounds plausible — I mean, we could call that a rationalization. We could also call that mental survival. I mean... Mira Wasserman: Yeah, I don't think... Yeah. And I think sometimes the reason — something can be a rationalization, can make you feel better, and it could also be sound reasoning. It doesn't mean it's the best possibility. But one thing that I actually was trying to get to bring out in that Evolve essay, is that a lot of the best decisions have already been foreclosed. They're out of our hands because of bad decisions that were made by other people with more power way earlier in this whole process. Bryan Schwartzman: And I definitely want to get into that, so right. You talk about, in early March as COVID was first hitting, some of the ethical guidelines that were circulating. Zeke Emanuel, known physician and health policy advisor had a piece, I believe in the Times. I mean, this was in reaction to what we saw happening in Italy in February and early March when hospitals were just being overwhelmed. I mean, you start from the point of looking at triage and its history, which just from what I learned before this interview, at least in the medical sense, goes back to the Napoleonic Wars and this idea of choosing which injured soldiers to treat based on injury level. So if I understood you correctly, in the medical sense in hospitals you find just the whole idea of triage problematic, potentially unethical. Is that correct? Is it more complicated than that? Mira Wasserman: Well, I would say that, I mean, triage emerges in a battlefield, in war and it's a method for getting the best possible result out of an awful, awful situation. So that's true in hospitals as well, but we've already sort of lost the ethics. If we're choosing between lives, depending on what kind of ethics you subscribe to, there might be better outcomes, worse outcomes, better decision, worse decisions, but human lives are going to be lost needlessly. And it's the needless part that really smarts, that really hurts. That we have the resources, nationally, regionally in some cases, to avoid putting hospitals under that kind of stress. And there were major failures that unfairly, I think, put the people — the healthcare workers on the front lines — in these really terrible situations of having to make selections of who will live and who will die. Mira Wasserman: But that's just one example, all of this stuff about schools, and buses, and school transit. You think about all of the months that everybody was talking about, are we going to open bars and restaurants through the summer? Why were we so hung up on bars and restaurants when every child in America goes to school? I mean why- Bryan Schwartzman: Or football? Mira Wasserman: Yeah, right, right, right, right. So I just think at every level there were these big fails, which doesn't get us individual people off the hook for thinking about how we can make the best possible decisions or do the best we can given these circumstances. Bryan Schwartzman: If the system is unethical and an ethical outcome is impossible for doctors and nurses, based on limited resources, based on the position they're put in, is there any room for individual moral responsibility, personal ethics? I mean, where does…. Mira Wasserman: Absolutely, absolutely. There's always better and worse outcomes. Always better and worse outcomes. So I credit people for thinking it through. I credit the ethicist who wrote these very carefully thought out procedures, for how you prioritize some people over others. And among ethicists, there was a big argument about how you prioritize people. And basically that's where I just wanted to say, this whole conversation is deeply troubling. Raises deep, ethical questions, that prioritizing some people over others. That's a space we don't want to go to. We should get there kicking and screaming if we take ethics seriously. But that doesn't mean that we're free not to think about doing the best we can in any circumstances, but when you come right down to it, this is something that I wanted to bring out. From the perspective of Jewish ethics… Human life is essentially of infinite value. So whenever one life has to crowd out another life, that's horrifying. That's a moral fail and it's not the moral fail of the person on the front lines. I think we all have to share some responsibility for that. Bryan Schwartzman: To push and advocate for a system where people have equal access to healthcare or where our leaders take disaster and pandemic precaution and planning seriously. I mean is that where you're coming from? Mira Wasserman: Yes, yes, yes. Another thing this whole disaster brings out for me, because of this scenario where the best efforts of the best people still couldn't save lives that otherwise could have been saved. It really brings out the limits of ethics as a pursuit that you can't really... You can be a very ethical person, full of virtues with a really good sense of values, and a real discipline to how you make your decisions. But if you're in an impossible situation where decisions have already been made by people with a lot more power, ethics alone isn't going to ensure an ethical outcome. You need to think politically and structurally and in terms of systems. Bryan Schwartzman: We're talking in mid-October, hopefully sooner rather than later, but we don't know, qe'll be talking about distribution and a vaccine. How, once we hopefully have a vaccine that works, that's scientifically proven, how that gets to people in the United States and the developed world. I mean, who's... You said ethics isn't necessarily for the ethicists, but who should be thinking about the implications of that? Mira Wasserman: Great. Well, I love that question because what really irked me about how people were talking about bioethics at the beginning of the pandemic, was that it was in this emergency, urgent situation where you have patients dying before you. That was horrifyingly awful. Now with this vaccine, we know a vaccine, maybe more than one, is coming. So already ethicists are sort of laying out principles for distribution. Certainly we can't all get the vaccine on the same day. So we need some sort of values-based principles for how the distribution is going to work. And that's a combination of how it's going to be most impactful and who's most vulnerable. So it makes sense, you get the most bang for your buck, if the people who are on the front lines and are the most at risk have priority. But we also want to make sure, in a way that we really didn't at the beginning of the pandemic, that the people who are most vulnerable, we reach out to for protection, and offer protection first. Bryan Schwartzman: Okay. Short time out here, we hope you're finding this a powerful interview. Do you want others to experience this kind of conversation? Please take a moment to give us a five-star rating, or leave a review. Positive ratings and reviews really help people find out about this show. All right. Back to the interview. Bryan Schwartzman: Your piece really got me thinking about how much we emulate the idea of the hero in our popular culture. Of somebody who operates with grace under pressure, who comes in and saves the day, despite the impossible situation. That's certainly — name 50 Hollywood movies that that's true for. I think going back to Hemingway, at least, we have such a strong attachment to the hero, and the hero who is individualistic and playing by their own set of rules. And I read your piece as a critique of that in some ways. Is that a fair reading and if- Mira Wasserman: It's a great reading. Yeah. I love that. First of all, I mean that hero worship that I think is really endemic to American culture and Hollywood, as you say, is a way to enshrine individualism, and sort of turn our backs on all of the ways that we depend on one another, that no one actually can do it alone. And it's a really dangerous idea that if you're suffering, it must be your fault. That's the flip side of this adulation of the individual hero who comes and saves the day. It's also a problem because it presumes that there's these moments that you're put to the test and everything hangs on this one moment. And I think the true measure of a person's moral fiber is sort of over the long haul of a lifetime of how you nurture relationships, and do the best you can over the long haul. Mira Wasserman: But there's also — most of those hero movies are people who live by the gun or something like that, they rush in. So there's this sort of interesting twist that happened in the pandemic, that for the first time, we're able to see the healing arts, caregiving, as a realm of heroism. And in a sense that's fantastic, but we're sort of still limiting it and thinking it's in the emergency room, in this time of great urgency and crisis. I'd love to think about moral heroism as what caregivers do every day. It's a lot harder to take care of people day in, day out, than in that adrenaline rush of having these mass of people with it in the ER, it's a different kind of hard, let's say. So. Yeah. Thinking about all of the people who keep our lives afloat and make things possible, assigning heroism to them would be a great outcome for this moment that we're living through. Bryan Schwartzman: So let's talk about the coronavirus resource you created for the Ethics Center. What is it, what did you have, or do you have in mind for it? Mira Wasserman: Yeah, so initially when we started it, it was March. If you remember back then where everything was closing down, it seemed like it was going to be this very quick thing. I think our building closed initially for two weeks or something, and we were going to reevaluate during Passover, and probably come back in three weeks or something like that. So initially we made this guide in the hope that it would actually help the organizations and community leaders ground decision-making about their synagogues, let's say, or schools, in Jewish values. And then we quickly saw that actually individuals like me needed help thinking these things through as well. Mira Wasserman: So we came up with some sort of leading values alongside pikuakh nefer, alongside this thing, saving a life. One of them, we already talked about medical science. So listening to medical experts, that's a Jewish value in itself, but that's not it. We also wanted people to always be thinking about the value of human dignity, that every human has dignity. We also wanted to be thinking about community as a real Jewish value. Mira Wasserman: And what emerged is, as we thought about the range of decisions people were making, it's probably, it wasn't to close or not to close, to open or not to open, but how to open. Given that physical spaces would probably have to be closed for a long time or transformed, what values should guide how we behave so that pikuakh nefer doesn't close down communal life, Jewish life, education. So if we were to take it back to an everyday decision, so there's good scientific reasons for me not to get on a plane, to go visit my father-in-law in California. It wouldn't be safe for me, and it wouldn't be safe for him. It's not in the cards probably for a number of months, but that doesn't release me from the value of respecting my parents. So now I have to find another way to express my obligation and my love, to my father-in-law. And I think in all kinds of decisions, individuals, organizations, people are doing that, finding other ways to express the value of community, when you can't do it in the ways that we're used to. Bryan Schwartzman: Parents. It's like a whole other thing, during this time, I'm not sure if I want to go there, but what you do, if you don't... If a parent or family members approach to risk assessment doesn't match yours. Mira Wasserman: Ah, yeah, yeah, no, a lot of people have faced that. But the other thing is we face it all the time. It just sort of turns up the volume on some of that. So if you have an older parent who's kept driving beyond the time that was probably safe for them to drive, tt raises similar issues of, they're endangering themselves every time they sit behind the wheel, and endangering people on the streets. And how do you balance... You're supposed to honor them, but one really good way to honor someone is to keep them alive. So I think a lot of what seems like a pandemic-specific ethical problem is actually a problem that was with us all the time. And it's just intensified and everybody's facing it at the same time suddenly. Mira Wasserman: Another thing you bring up, we talked about this a little bit when we were chatting, but one of the big fails right now is, that ideally laws would help with ethics. That there would be some law. If you think about the driving thing, in some states, you get to a certain age or you have a certain diagnosis, and you have to demonstrate your safety to an outside expert. It's not on a kid to take the keys away. Or at least there's a certain point where it's not on you as an adult child of a failing parent on your own. "Failing parent", That sounds really strong, but "person who maybe shouldn't be driving anymor"e. But one of the real disappointments of this time is that we haven't... The laws aren't helping, officials aren't helping. And just because something is allowed. They opened up restaurants, let's say. We kind of don't trust necessarily that they're safe just because they're open. So public trust has really been undermined, and law isn't functioning to back up ethics in the way that one would hope. Bryan Schwartzman: I mean, law represents a minimum standard, and ethics represents a higher standard, on some level? Mira Wasserman: I think that's what you want. That's if the system is working well. But there should always be- Bryan Schwartzman: But if the law is not even, it's not even reaching the minimum standard. It's not keeping us safe. Mira Wasserman: Right, right. And if we're thinking about racial justice, the big... We know from American history that laws can be unethical. Bryan Schwartzman: One of the highlights of the resource, it points to values-based decision making, which is a communal approach to decision making that was really popularized, conceived, by your predecessor at the Ethics Center, Rabbi David Teutsch. And the first— basically steps A and B are A, determine facts, alternative actions and their outcomes, and B, examine relevant, scientific, and social scientific approaches to understanding these. So to make bigger communal, or societal decisions, there has to be something like if not a consensus, somewhere in the ballpark of agreement on A and B. So it seems to me the whole values-based decision approach assumes that people are acting in good faith. So what happens if part of society is not acting in good faith, or is not agreeing on what the facts are, is there any ethical path forward? Or are there ethical guidelines for how to deal with bad actors? I just asked about six questions. Mira Wasserman: Okay. So about values-based decision making, Yeah. I think, thanks for pulling that out. This is the point that Rabbi David Teutsch makes all the time, you hear values-based decision making, and you think, oh, I just identify my values and then I know what to do. But it's actually a much more disciplined, careful approach. You're right. That it's developed as the way that communities make decisions together. It also, by the way, is a great guide to individual decision-making. We can talk more about that later, but I think we've had actually amazing examples of this in recent months, of communities coming together to do values-based decision making, and precisely because we didn't have great leadership from officials at many levels of government, what I saw in synagogue communities, for example, and school communities, is leaders making sure that they have the right expertise on their COVID committees. Mira Wasserman: So often, let's just say a synagogue, for example, there'd be a committee and they'd be sure to tap somebody who had specific medical knowledge from within that community, or they'd find a local person outside. So I think whether people called it values-based decision making or not, we saw tremendous local examples of this kind of decision making. People gathering up folks with the appropriate expertise. And at the other place we sawit, is a lot of organizations talked about scenario planning. Scenario planning is an example of those early steps where you play out what could happen. And then what are the range of responses if this happens? Mira Wasserman: So if infection rates go up, then what are the range of possible things that we can do? And if they go down, what are the range of possible things that we can do? So I think we saw a lot of great examples of people doing this, and people did it at the communal level, organizational level, and even at the household level, even when it wasn't happening where you would expect it to happen. Bryan Schwartzman: Okay. While we have just another couple seconds of your time, if you'd like to support these groundbreaking conversations of Evolve on the podcast, on the website, in our online conversations, you can, you can support us. You can make a contribution to ReconstructingJudaism.org/evolve-donate. There's also a Donate link in our show notes. Every gift matters and continues these conversations. Thanks so much for listening and thank you for your support. All right. Now, back to Rabbi Mira Beth Wasserman. Bryan Schwartzman: So what should someone do? The next time you meet someone that says, "I don't know whether to go here. I don't know whether to do X or Y," what would you recommend they go and go through the steps of values-based decision making? What, is there... Mira Wasserman: Well for individual decisions, yeah, no, it's a great question. So the steps, I think the steps are a translation of what careful decision makers do. Because it's not just moving through seven steps, it's always somewhat iterative. In that different scenarios occur to you. And then you need to go back a couple steps and figure out, oh, well, how would I respond to this? How would I respond to that? But I think the real takeaway for me and where I hope the guide will help people, it's not like a tool where you put in the input, "this is my situation" and there's some algorithm and it comes out with, "this is what you do". It's rather sort of a careful process for thinking through what's most important to me, and what does Jewish tradition have to say to me, what wisdom is in the tradition about this particular conflict, dilemma, that I'm wrestling with? Mira Wasserman: And I hope by considering the different values, one sees that health and safety is a component of everything, but there's always going to be a more healthy, more safe way to do something, and a less healthy, less safe way to do something. So you can choose a more healthy, more safe way to engage with your parents let's say. Or to engage with your community, or to make your political voice heard. Mira Wasserman: And I really hope that one benefit of thinking through the values is to overcome the sort of impulse to isolation that was always in our culture, and has gotten so much more intense. We're sort of huddled down in our own homes and spaces. And I hope that by focusing on values, people remember that there's a world of neighbors out there, other people who we have obligations to, beyond our own households. Bryan Schwartzman: I really appreciate the conversation. Thanks. Thanks for being here. I guess let's hope for better things. Better things ahead. Mira Wasserman: Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity to talk things through. Thank you. Bryan Schwartzman: Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Rabbi Mira Beth Wasserman. If you enjoyed our talk, please be sure to read the essay, "Against Apocalyptic Ethics: Human Responsibility Before, During, and After a Pandemi". And in that essay, you can also link to, there's a link to the "Jewish Values and the Coronavirus resourc"e. So what'd you think of today's episode? I want to hear from you. Evolve is about meaningful conversations and you are a part of that. Send us your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you got. You can reach at BSchwartzman@ReconstructingJudaism.org. You write a great email, maybe I'll even end up reading it on the air. Reminder, we'll be back next month with a brand new episode and interview. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub, and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. The show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and we'll see you next time.