Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.
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Maria Pulzetti: 
What I didn't want was for people to be sitting in their synagogue and Shabbat morning and see the Torah reading is about slavery and want to throw the book across the room and be done with it. I didn't want people to stop, so I wanted to provide some different approaches to what we do when we face a text like this.

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Bryan Schwartzman: 
I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman, and today I'm speaking with Maria Pulzetti, a public defender human rights lawyer turned rabbinical student. We're going to be talking with Maria about her essay, Remember, Retell, Resist: Reading Difficult Biblical Passages. It's a powerful essay that demands close reading and rereading that links Torah reproductive rights and the stain of slavery on the American experiment.
In addition, we're going to discuss what motivated her to become a rabbi in the first place, her opposition to the death penalty, and her time in the early 2000s as a human rights worker in Russia, particularly around atrocities committed in the Russian war in Chechnya. Today, we're privileged to have with us Rabbi Jacob Staub, my friend, executive producer, and also the editor of the entire Evolve project, the director. Hi, Jacob, how are you?

Jacob Staub:
I'm good. How are you doing, Bryan?

Bryan Schwartzman:
Good, good. Jacob, you commissioned this essay. I'm wondering what did you think or envision Maria's essay bringing to the Evolve conversation?

Jacob Staub:
Yes, I think this is a really important piece that Maria has written because she tackles the question of what we do with objectionable texts, specifically in this case, objectionable texts about men and women, male and female are treated differently, often in very stark and upsetting ways. We have had several different ways of dealing with this in the past.
One is to expunge it and not mention it, say that was then, and this is now and we don't believe that, so we're not going to deal with that anymore, or to apologize, the second possibility say things were better for women in ancient Israel than they were in surrounding cultures, defensively. What Maria suggests we do is modeled on, I think what goes on in our society as critical race theory. In the case of critical race theory, we acknowledge America's "original sin," that slavery was really there and we need to recognize it, memorialize it.
She doesn't say it explicitly, but the implication is that we Jews have difficulty looking in the historical mirror to say boy was that terrible. Boy, there are really objectionable ugly parts of our past. She suggests that we do that, that we look in the mirror and we heal in two different ways. She'll, I'm sure, elaborate on it. One is to use what we are really good at, memory. It would be healing if we could venture into historical memory and acknowledge and remember a sexual and reproductive subordination in order to heal. Second, in terms of looking in the mirror, she suggests that we model again on the civil rights, the enslaved people, civil rights struggle of resistance and reframing.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Can we, as Jews who care about Judaism in some fashion or another, can we both resist Torah while at the same time finding wisdom in it?

Jacob Staub:
Yes, that's the point. The way to do that, honestly, is to acknowledge what we reconstruct, but not to erase where we reconstruct, but to acknowledge it and to be proud of our very checkered traditions. They're not all ones that we want to embrace, but we do embrace the entirety of our legacy and we move forward by healing from the things that we might resist.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I may be a classroom of one, I think I'm still the last in the class to get the point, but I really appreciate you explaining it to a slow learner, and I think that makes a lot of sense and opens up so much that we're going to discuss with Maria.

Jacob Staub:
Good. Great. You're a great pupil.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thanks for publishing the piece and inviting Maria to be on the podcast.

Jacob Staub:
Great.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Jacob, before we let you get on with the rest of your busy life, what's coming up exciting at Evolve that we should know about? There's always something.

Jacob Staub:
Yes, thank you for the opportunity. First, I want to highlight again that first week in September, there will be a really wonderful symposium on the web about democracy and tyranny based on the scholar Timothy Snyder's book on tyranny, 20 Lessons From the 20th Century, and we have people talking about each of those 20 lessons.

Bryan Schwartzman:
That book was a big deal a couple of years ago, right?

Jacob Staub:
Yeah. In 2017, 2018, yeah. We have former congressman, Andy Levin, we have former counsel person, Ruth Messinger. It's a very nice list of people who are going to be talking. Also, we have a really fascinating web conversation with Rabbi Margie Jacobs on Wednesday, September 18th at 2:00 PM Eastern Time, looking at Jewish sources for how to deal with really difficult catastrophic circumstances and where we think God is, where the holy is, where the mystery is, and how do we deal with difficult times, which some of us, many of us think we're going through right now. That will also be really enlightening in preparation for the high holidays.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Wow, those both sound great. Thank you for... We'll leave links and registration links in the show notes. Thank you, Jacob. Great to have you on the show.

Jacob Staub:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
All right, let's get to our guest. Maria Pulzetti is a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College outside Philadelphia, and serves as student rabbi at the Germantown Jewish Center in that city's Mount Airy section. During Maria's legal career, she worked at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia as well as a public defender. Maria Pulzetti, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you here.

Maria Pulzetti:
Thanks so much, Bryan. I'm really glad to be here.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I guess I'll start. If I read the essay correctly, and that's always a big if, I think it really hit at a central question for liberal Jews, non-Orthodox Jews, or Jews who might hold liberal political or social values. That's if we embrace Judaism, what do we do with the parts, especially the passages from Torah that seem to really just directly undercut or go against our values and beliefs, whether it's the death penalty, whether it's marriage equality. I guess how do you generally approach that since it seems like it's a question you've thought a lot about?

Maria Pulzetti:
Yeah, no, thanks for asking. I do feel like that was one of the core questions motivating this piece and something... This piece originated in Devar Torah that I gave earlier this year, in the middle of my third year of rabbinical school, and these are questions that animate me as a rabbinical student and me as an aspiring rabbi, an emerging rabbi, and teacher of the Jewish people.
The specific troubling text that I chose to face head on in this essay is a section in the book of Exodus that begins with the laws of slavery and particular laws about treatment of enslaved women. When the Torah talks about slavery, this can be something very, very difficult for any of us to read, especially as American Jews living in a country that was founded upon the labor of enslaved people, and that is still grappling with the legacy of slavery and systemic racism, systemic anti-black racism.
I wanted to raise those questions, and I imagine, I hope, that these questions also animate Orthodox Jews, modern Orthodox Jews, and other Orthodox Jews who are also grappling with the same questions, the same text, and how do we face them? What I didn't want was for people to be sitting in their synagogue and Shabbat morning and see the Torah reading is about slavery and want to throw the book across the room and be done with it. I didn't want people to stop and say okay, this is not relevant to me, this isn't something that I can really even imagine holding as a sacred text.
I wanted to provide some different approaches to what we do when we face a text like this, and the two I propose in this essay are what I called memory, which is essentially finding our story in the text, and resistance, which is resisting the text, having a critical approach to the text, and thinking about how do we develop law further if this isn't a satisfying end to the text. That's the framework of where the essay began. I'm interested in what you would like me to explain more.

Bryan Schwartzman:
First off, I think it's a really good point you made about the Orthodox, our movement and this podcast is certainly, we think of it as towards a non-Orthodox audience, but I think it's narrow-minded on my part to assume folks aren't thinking about some of these same questions, maybe coming at it from different perspectives. It's an important corrective you made there. Since you mentioned it, can you tell us more about the section of Exodus that you chose? What does it actually say there?

Maria Pulzetti:
Right, okay. This is a section of law, it's the first long section of law in the Torah. It comes right after the 10 Commandments. It turns out that at Mount Sinai, God had the 10 Commandments to share with the Jewish people and also had a whole lot more laws to share with the Jewish people. There are a lot of civil laws about how we interact with other people, including some laws that are familiar to us that may be much more animating for our lives today, such as do not oppress the stranger for you are strangers in Egypt/ that's in this section and in other places in the Torah, but it begins with the loss of slavery.
It was really striking to me that this section of laws that's taught by biblical scholars as we learned in our bib-siv class at ROC, that it's a section about how the Torah elevates the importance and sanctity of human life, but it begins with something that as an American Jew is very, very difficult to read. It's this idea that if a slave holder gives an enslaved man a woman and she bears him children, that the woman and her children remain enslaved even after the man's emancipation, and the laws about the children of slaves say that if an enslaved woman bears a child, then the child has the same status as her, becomes the property of the slave holder.
It also assumes that the enslaved woman is somehow available to bear children, I.e., that she's sexually available to the slave holder. That was the difficult basis that I chose to work with in this text. One of the reasons that I chose that is not only because of my own interest in American history and in civil rights law, but also because this particular piece emerged, as I said, from a Devar Torah that I gave, and the Devar Torah was on Repro Shabbat, which is an annual occasion that the National Council of Jewish Women has founded for bringing teaching about reproductive justice into synagogues. Reading those verses and thinking about the lack of sexual autonomy for women and the lack of reproductive autonomy for women that you could see so clearly in those verses, I wanted to highlight that in the teaching.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You pointed out in the essay that in... I don't remember, was it the Virginia House of Delicates in the 17th century adopted laws that were pretty similar to what was laid out in Exodus when it came to the status of children of slaves, do we have any way of knowing if... Or do we assume that the pre-founders were influenced or were aware of this Torah portion?

Maria Pulzetti:
I want to step back a little bit and talk a little bit about my thinking of why I went to the Virginia Slave Codes because I didn't... I thought pretty carefully about do I want to make explicit comparison in this piece between slavery as described in the book of Exodus and American chattel slavery because we have nothing near the historical record of slavery in Egypt that we have of slavery in the United States. We know much, much, much more about slavery in the United States than we know about biblical slavery, but we assume that they're not exactly the same thing.
I wanted to compare the two to give American Jews tools to read texts about slavery in the Torah, but I also wanted to be careful not to equate the two and say that they're exactly one and the same, because we know that they're not and of course the history of slavery in the United States is so recent, and because it goes back really only a few generations, we know that we may even have people in our communities who are directly descended from enslaved people or from people who held enslaved people. We know that these issues can be very close to members of our communities.
All of that said, I did really want to... Especially because of the similarities between the law as described in the Torah and this Virginia Slave Code, the Virginia Slave Codes were the first articulation of these types of laws controlling the lives of slaves and controlling the legal status of slaves in the United States even before the United States was a country in the colonies. Those codes were the models for other slave-holding states or slave-holding colonies, so they're what historians often study as the model for what slave codes looked like in the various colonies and states where slavery was legal.
To go back to your question of do we think the Virginia legislature was modeling their codes on biblical law, I'm not a historian and I don't have enough knowledge to know whether people have studied that question, what the answer is. I think it's certainly possible, in what I could imagine, that biblical text would be very familiar to people in that time, and they may have had awareness of it but what I think is more important for us to remember is that these were primarily these laws, so it was a change. In English common law, which was controlling in Virginia, descent and inheritance and economic rights were patrilineal, they came through the father.
This law was a significant change to establish matrilineal descent for people who were enslaved. The reason for that was largely to give white men access to the bodies of enslaved women and access to them sexually and then for the progeny of those rapes or that sexual abuse to be property of the slaveholders. It comes for a very specific reason that may or may not be the reason underlying the biblical text.

Bryan Schwartzman:
If I'm understanding, broadly speaking, your approach to difficult passages of the Torah is neither to throw them out nor to rehabilitate them and make them try to say something they don't really say, but to wrestle with its meaning as much as possible within your own context, which is America and its history. Is that something like your approach or just your approach in this one case? I guess trying to get back to what do we do with the stuff that makes our skin crawl?

Maria Pulzetti:
I think the part of that summary that I agree with the most is to not throw it out. As an emerging rabbi-

Bryan Schwartzman:
All right, one out of three is good.

Maria Pulzetti:
As an emerging rabbi, I do think there's always something we can learn from the text, even if what we learn is disagreement. Yes, I advocate for not throwing out the text. I think I just want to be careful to say... I think one of the things you said was that I was not trying to rehabilitate it. I think in this particular instance, I'm not really trying to rehabilitate it, but I do think there are times when I am with other texts possibly, and often the rabbinic interpretations of difficult passages in Torah are trying to rehabilitate them. That's actually a very common rabbinic approach.
For instance, what the rabbinic teachings are about the set of laws governing slavery in general is that sure, this is about slavery, but it's actually a much more humane approach to slavery and much more protective of the position of enslaved people than was sort of prevailing in other societies surrounding the Israelite people. That's a way of rehabilitating it that I chose not to use here, but that is a rabbinic approach.
I do think there's something about what I call here memory, and what I actually learned later in the semester after I'd written this piece is academically called the hermeneutics of remembrance, which just basically means memory, that locating ourselves in the text and being able to tell a story about the text, we classically do this with the story of the Exodus from Egypt that we tell our Passover Seders, that's a technique of approaching a text, a difficult text, and it's one that I don't shy away from and that I think in certain instances, using that approach is really valuable.
Even here, a lot of the things I said is our task, living as American Jews in this time of threats to reproductive justice, is to insert a hermeneutics of remembrance into these stories of reproductive autonomy and talk about the stories we know about people's fights for reproductive justice in our own country, talk about the stories of people who did not have reproductive sexual autonomy because of unjust laws, and to bring those stories into the conversation just like we talk about other difficult things that have faced for people. That's that.
The final piece, the piece of finding a new approach, which I called resistance, which could be called reframing, which could be called a critical approach, I think that's a really exciting way of developing the law, especially when we're talking about Torah texts because the Torah is the original text, the original law that we have and there are centuries and centuries about 2,000 years of interpretation of these texts.
It very rarely stops there in what is even sort of traditional Jewish interpretation. There's very often many ways that a text is from the Torah has actually been turned into a very different meaning by the rabbis. That's a wonderful thing to do with congregations is to say okay, it said this in the Torah, but then the rabbis interpret it in a very different way.
For instance, you mentioned earlier the death penalty. That's how the rabbis treat the death penalty, that it's very clearly authorized in the Torah for many offenses, and the rabbis narrowed the death penalty's applicability so significantly that it virtually becomes in inapplicable under rabbinic law, and we understand that it could be very rarely implemented. That's a good way to teach people and to confront texts about the death penalty in Torah is to talk about how actually the tradition didn't stop there, that we have very different teachings in the rabbinic era.

Sam Wachs:
Hi, this is Sam Wachs. I edit the show. I'm taking a quick break from Bryan's conversation with Maria Pulzetti to tell you about an exciting gathering hosted by Ritual Well. It's called Resilience Boost: Spiritual Accelerant For the Election Season, and it's on Wednesday, September 11th, 2024 from 12:00 to 1:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.
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That's not all. Registration for this event includes a special Resilience Boost package. Now, the package includes an e-book, a beautifully curated printable e-book that concludes resources of poetry and prayers that will help keep your energy going strong through the election season. There's also weekly meditations that can be sent to you by text or email, whatever you prefer, and they're optional. If you don't want them, you don't need them. They'll come to you directly every Tuesday through the election.
The Resilience Boost package, the Resilience Boost event, that's all included with registration. We have put a link in the show notes, you can also go to ritualwell.org, click on Learn Online, and find the event, Resilience Boost: Spiritual Accelerant For the Election Season. Okay, thank you so much for registering. We really hope to see you there this September at the live event. Now back to Bryan's conversation with Maria Pulzetti.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You mentioned that this was originally delivered your essay in connection to Repro Shabbat. It's hard to exaggerate how challenging this time is for reproductive rights in the United States, certainly since the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe versus Wade, and even before as Roe v. Wade was getting practically chipped away on a state level. Given those realities, what do you look for in Torah, in Judaism, either for... I don't know, for what but I guess, what would you look for in Torah and Judaism given the realities this country and women in this country or people, anyone who's able to have a child are facing now?

Maria Pulzetti:
Right. Yeah, no, there was a rally in May of 2022, it was actually after the draft, the leak of the decision had been released, but the final decision had to come out. Rabbi Deborah Waxman was there, and several other RRC students and other Jews from around the country were in Washington making our presence known as Jews who are committed to reproductive justice and to access to abortion for all.
As a person of my generation, obviously I knew that the litigation challenging Roe had been happening for many years, but it still was really shocking for Roe to be overturned. I know also for many people of the generation one generation older than mine, it was even more so shocking because they had lived through the transition from much less access to abortion pre-Roe to broader access, although far from perfect access, and still inequitable access after Roe was decided. They were really shocked to see their children and grandchildren losing rights that they thought were protected by the Constitution.
I'm really interested in engaging with people Jewishly on this topic because I know it directly affects so many people's lives, and of course, my own life as a woman and as a parent of two children who I hope will grow up with protections for their reproductive rights. I think that's one of the reasons why I chose to focus on these questions about slavery is because reproductive justice in our country has been inequitable along the lines of both race and poverty.
We also know that laws restricting access to birth control methods and to methods to end pregnancies, including abortion, actually began to be codified after the Civil War, and historians who've studied the development of these laws have taught us that restrictions on access to reproductive rights were actually designed to limit access to reproduction for black women largely, and of course, affecting all people who could become pregnant.
I wanted to invite people to grapple with the impact of anti-black racism on everyone's reproductive rights and freedoms. Those are the challenging reasons I wanted to do this piece, but I also wanted people to see that we have models of resistance and models of autonomy, including women's autonomy and women's reproductive autonomy in Torah, and I wanted to give people that as well, reasons to hope and reasons to engage together as Jewish communities to reflect our values.

Bryan Schwartzman:
For 50 years plus, abortion has been framed as a religious argument, mostly from the conservative Christian perspective that life begins at conception. We've seen, since 2022, efforts to argue that having access to abortion is based on religious perspectives. Have you followed that? I guess I was curious if you could unpack those legal efforts for us.

Maria Pulzetti:
Okay, so I am really interested in... Of course, as you can probably imagine by now, I'm interested in amplifying Jewish teaching, Jewish halachic teaching, teaching in Jewish law about reproductive justice and about when life begins, although I want to address separately the question of making those arguments in court.
We learn from very old Jewish text, in fact, the reason that Repro Shabbat is held during Parshat Mishpatim is because that Torah portion contains a law about if there's an injury that causes a pregnant person to lose their pregnancy, what are the damages for that? It turns out it is not the same as if someone's life had been ended. There are monetary damages, not the same as if there had been a killing. On the basis of that, verse those verses in the Torah, we learned that even as old as biblical law did not consider ending a pregnancy to be equated with killing a person therefore, the pregnancy isn't a person in the sense that a living being whose life gets the same value in biblical law as someone who's already born.
On the basis of that, the rabbis teach generally, life begins at the moment of birth. This is very different than the conservative Christian argument that life begins at conception and Jewish law, [foreign language 00:33:48], is based on this idea that one is not a person under Jewish law until one has been born. Actually, it might be until the majority of the body has emerged, including the head, so there might be some moment of birth hasn't quite been complete, but the person is considered a living human being.
When a person is considered a living human being in Jewish law, of course all of the protections of [foreign language 00:34:16], all of the value that Jewish law and Jewish tradition places on saving life apply to them, but they don't apply before birth. That's a very different approach to conservative Christian theology and it's one that we haven't seen articulated in the public sphere in the... Of course it has been attempted to be articulated, but it hasn't dominated, as you said, Bryan, the American debate about abortion from a religious perspective, the conservative Christian perspective has dominated that in terms of religious perspectives on when life begins and therefore whether an abortion is the ending of a life or not.
It seems quite clear that under Jewish law, abortion is not the ending of a life, therefore it's not a killing. This doesn't mean that rabbinic text and [foreign language 00:35:10] promote abortion as an affirmative value, but protecting the life of the mother, protecting the health and wellbeing of the mother because the mother, or the pregnant person is a person who has all of the protections of a living being under Jewish law, so that always trumps the pregnancy until the moment of birth when they have equal protection under Jewish law as living beings.
That's I think what you were referring to as a very different approach in Judaism as opposed to the religious arguments that are made in this country in the... What do they call it? They call it pro-life. In terms of the litigation, litigation is a tricky thing. People often plan litigation knowing that courts are interested in or persuaded by certain types of arguments, and especially on the United States Supreme Court right now, we know that religious freedom is an argument that has a lot of persuasive power with the justices because the court is packed with very conservative justices who made it clear even in their confirmation hearings and have made it clear in their opinions that religious freedom is an important value to them and elevating, generally, Christian religious practices over other people's rights.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Where right to privacy probably wouldn't be the way to go in 2024.

Maria Pulzetti:
Exactly, exactly. When people talk about wanting to litigate reproductive rights cases from the Jewish religious perspective of being able to practice their religion by having access to abortion and to birth control and to all necessary ways to protect the pregnant person's health and well-being, they have an argument to make of religious freedom based in Jewish law and based in their practice and belief.
I have a lot of hesitation personally as a lawyer about using that approach. I understand the pragmatism of appealing to a legal argument that one thinks that federal judges or the justices of the Supreme Court would be persuaded by. However, I personally have no interest in amplifying or strengthening the types of protections around religious freedom that these justices are interested in strengthening or amplifying, and I don't think litigation in that area is going to protect the rights of the Jewish people or of religious minorities or LGBTQ and queer people or of women.
I think it's a quite outcome oriented approach by people on the religious right to use religious freedom when it's convenient for their religion and their view of the world, but not to use it when it's not convenient for their religion and their view of the world. Speaking simply, personally as myself, I have a lot of hesitation along about those arguments. I also understand why people are making them because the other arguments, quite frankly, have lost the precedent against the other types of... Like right to privacy, as you mentioned. The precedent against that right now is pretty strong, and so people are making efforts that are understandable.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Are you able to help us understand, unpack some of the more recent challenges or legislation limiting in vitro fertilization? The challenges to abortion have been around and in the public square as long as most of us have been alive, if not longer. This feels so much newer, and it really does feel very foreign to the Jewish tradition, like look at Israel, in vitro fertilization is very heavily subsidized. It's, from what I understand, very encouraged in even ultra-Orthodox communities. It just seems like a very different perspective. Do you view it as part of the fight for reproductive rights, guaranteeing access to whatever... I don't know what the correct term would be, but these child-bearing methods?

Maria Pulzetti:
Right. I do think it's important when we talk about reproductive freedom, reproductive rights, reproductive justice to include not only access to abortion, but access to family planning, and birth control, and gender-affirming care, and also fertility treatment because all of these are ways of caring for someone's reproductive health. As we know, families and individuals make extraordinarily private decisions about their reproductive health, often with the goal of having a family, which of course, as you mentioned is an important goal for an affirmative value for the Jewish people, is having children and raising children.
Okay, so to go back to your question, I don't think I'm prepared to give a deep legal analysis specifically of the specifically of the IVF cases, but I think it's a very interesting moment, it was interesting to watch, it has been interesting to watch these things develop because there was a very strong backlash against restricting IVF access because of course, all people of all political persuasions and all religious persuasions may have difficulty conceiving children and may rely on this medical care. There was a really strong reaction against it.
I think we shouldn't be naive in any way that overruling Roe was the final step. I think it was really only one of the first steps in far right plans to restrict the rights of all people of all of their reproductive freedoms, including access to care for people who are experiencing infertility. I think this is part of the project, this is something we're going to keep seeing. It's interesting to me that the resistance to that particular thing was much more strong and more a broader range of people were opposed to that than to restrictions on abortion. Of course, many people I know, many friends, of course, members of my congregation and many other Jewish communities rely on this healthcare.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Quick announcement here. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is produced by Reconstructing Judaism. August 31st marks the end of that organization's fiscal year and we get it, with everything going on in the world, an organization's fiscal year doesn't seem all that important, yet how much an organization raises in a certain year greatly impacts its planning what it can do, its staffing, the impact it makes on the world.
Reconstructing Judaism, the central organization of the reconstructionist movement, works to strengthen communities and enrich lives in so many ways. I'm just telling you quickly about it. Its thriving communities team provides substantive, logistical, and strategic support to nearly 100 congregations in North America, in the Caribbean, in Europe, helping communities tackle challenges related to security and anti-Semitism, to engage in conversations on Israel and Palestine, and so much more.
It's got Ritual Well, which we've talked about, an extensive online resource that has curated thousands of prayers, poems, ceremonies, and songs, many of which help meet the moments for which Jewish tradition previously did not have a ritual or a way to mark. Evolve, this podcast, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations, the website and podcast that model respectful and constructive dialogue across difference and really puts out their innovative solutions and ideas about the Jewish future.
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I wanted to spend a couple of minutes asking about your journey. I mean, we know, or I think I know you were, for many years, a lawyer working on social justice issues as a public defender. Fill me in where I get it wrong, but really working case by case to make the world more just, and I guess I'm wondering what about Judaism, what about the rabbinate led you to say that's actually where I can make the bigger impact or a different impact?

Maria Pulzetti:
Yeah, thank you for asking-

Bryan Schwartzman:
You already got into rabbinical school, so there's no wrong answer, right?

Maria Pulzetti:
Thanks for asking. People ask this question a lot, and the very short answer is that I fell completely in love with Torah. I really didn't begin studying Torah until the middle of my life, until I was in my late 30s. I fell so in love that ultimately I decided to change the direction of my career and apply to rabbinical school. That's the short answer. It wasn't that I had, as you said, extremely meaningful work as a lawyer.
I represented people sentenced to death for many years and I did appeals for people in other criminal cases, and then I spent four years doing legal aid work in Philadelphia at community legal services, addressing public benefits, so addressing really essential public benefits like Medicaid, food stamps, nutrition assistance under WIC, social security, things that help people live their lives, and also addressing legislative challenges in the state of Pennsylvania to those essential benefits.
Of course, it took me some time to make the decision to move from that important work that meant a lot to me and means a lot to me to becoming a rabbi, but ultimately I found that this is what I want to spend my time doing and this is the way I want to relate to people.
I think I have found many, many similarities between the work, especially because I was always doing direct client services and really my role as a lawyer was to learn my client's story and then to articulate that story in a way to protect their rights or to recover their rights and to be in an ongoing relationship with my client. Capital clients, you're in relationship with, God willing, for many years because the cases are very slow, and ultimately you want to stop the execution and it takes a long time.
I do find that the work of being a rabbi or an emerging rabbi is a type of relationship that's very different. First of all, it's not only focused on problem solving and then hopefully it's not primarily focused on problem solving whereas lawyers, clients come to lawyers because they have a problem that they need to have solved, and rabbis have the privilege of accompanying people in many different times in their lives. In times of celebration, in times of mourning, in ordinary times through, God willing, marriages, births, deaths, holidays.
The privilege of accompanying people in that way is quite different than legal work because it allows for the opportunity of transcendence, it allows rabbis to be part of creating sacred space for individuals, for communities, and that's what I love most about the work.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You mentioned capital cases. I was wondering if you could say more. From what I understand, the opposition to the death penalty really animated your work as a lawyer, and we have the portions about the death penalty in Judaism that, as you say, even the ancient rabbis reconstructed. I guess I'm just wondering if there's a through line there from legal work to Judaism and opposition to the death penalty.

Maria Pulzetti:
For me, there certainly is and there was, and I consider that work absolutely sacred. I thought for a while that I could continue doing that work and doing that work from a Jewish perspective, and that might be enough. It turned out for me, I wanted to focus my days differently but there are many people, actually, many people who were my colleagues, representing people who were sentenced to death, who were motivated or animated by their religious beliefs.
Of course, not only people who identify as Jewish, but people with other religious traditions as well. There is something extraordinarily sacred about talking about manners of life and death and about thinking about our relationship as human beings and our relationship as people who are part of a state and a country, and choosing to oppose the right of that state or that country to execute the death penalty, to take away someone's life.
I greatly admire people who do that work for secular reasons, people who do that work for religious reasons. I learned probably the most from my clients themselves about resilience, about having, in most cases, extraordinarily difficult lives and of having committed very difficult crimes, very awful crimes, and I learned to have conversations about things that many of us probably haven't spoken with people about, like conversations about killing people, conversations about the worst days of people's lives and days that ended people's lives.
I also learned a lot about being a human being in the world and about the challenges of affirming life in the face of violence and the face of the dehumanizing aspects of our system of incarceration. I spent a lot of time visiting my clients in various prisons and learned a lot about our system of mass incarceration and a lot of the flaws in that system.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You've physically and emotionally gone places most of us haven't gone and seen things about the system most of us maybe only read about or see on TV. That's got to be something you carry with you.

Maria Pulzetti:
Absolutely it's something I carry with me. I, as a Jew and as a rabbinical student, I'm already beginning my preparations for the high holidays, as you can probably imagine. The overwhelming theme of the high holidays is Teshuva, is this idea of turning, this idea of we can change our lives, we can become a different person, we can grow, we can learn from our mistakes.
A system that insists that someone who has made one of the gravest mistakes that's possible for a human being to make that we are not going to have faith in that person's Teshuva that we don't think that person can do anything to rehabilitate themselves, and that their life has to be ended as a result, I find fundamentally an un-Jewish or incorrect approach, unjust approach. I also consider it unjust under secular law, of course, for me.
When we talk about Teshuva during the high holidays, when we think about a person's ability to reflect on their biggest mistakes and to try to grow and learn as a human being and try to become a different human being, I have models that maybe not everyone sitting in the congregation has.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Going back a ways maybe to the early 2000s, you were a human rights lawyer in Russia, that's correct?

Maria Pulzetti:
I did human work in Russia. It was actually before I went to law school, although I was in a law office, but I can explain that. But yes.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I guess just seeing where Russia is in 2024, I'm a former journalist, so I'm certainly extra sensitive to the plight of Evan Gurskiewicz. Are you thinking back to that time at all? Did your time there shape... How might it have shaped the lawyer you were or the rabbi you're becoming? I'm curious because in many ways, it seems like such a different time when maybe a democratic Russia was possible.

Maria Pulzetti:
Yeah, right. When I was in college, studying humanities and literature, that was really the time when seems like a new Russia was possible. It was exciting, and I had the chance to live in Russia right after I graduated from college when the State Department was still funding programs for young Americans to go over and work in NGOs and develop democratic organizations and processes.
That was very much a part of my learning of Russian and the beginning of my time in Russia, although that first year that I was in Russia was included the New Year's Eve of 1999 to 2000, which was when Yeltsin handed over the prime ministership to Putin, so then Putin was in power, and so then the next few years that I was working on Russian human rights work, Putin was emerging in his political identity and his authoritarianism and his restrictions on human rights work and as you say, journalism and opposition politicians.
I guess what I want to say about the political situation is I left Moscow and began law school in 2003, the summer of 2003, and although the work I was doing on human rights in Chechnya with my brave... I was the only actual westerner in the office, all of my colleagues were Russian nationals of various ethnicities, some of them from Chechnya and that region, and some of them ethnically Russian. My colleagues were taking much greater risks than I was, but still it's the riskiest work I've ever done by far. When I started doing death penalty work, my parents were relieved. They were like oh, that's so safe.

Bryan Schwartzman:
You were actually in Chechnya or you were based in Moscow doing this work, or both?

Maria Pulzetti:
I was based in Moscow and when we traveled down to meet with our clients in Chechnya, we actually met with them in the neighboring Republic called Ingushetia, which was significantly safer, but still required a level of security that I haven't worked under since. When I was doing that work, there were real concerns for my colleagues, for our clients in particular, even more so than my colleagues and for other human rights workers and journalists.
That level of threat to human rights, workers, journalists, opposition politicians has increased probably a thousandfold since I left and has gotten, as you know, much, much worse. There have been assassinations, there are political prisoners, the head of our main partner Human Rights Group, which was a group called Memorial, he was prosecuted and sentenced essentially for leading a human rights organization and for working with foreigners.
There's a lot of political prosecution. It has gotten much, much worse since I left. I guess the other thing I want to say about that work is that that was my first time. We were a very tiny NGO that had just begun, that was bringing these cases from Chechnya, human rights cases from Chechnya to the European Court of Human Rights and because we were so shoestring, and even though I wasn't a lawyer, I had the privilege of meeting with our clients frequently, interviewing them, helping put together their cases, of course, under the supervision of lawyers.
That work, that direct services work with clients, with people in need is something I fell in love with and then wanted to continue as a lawyer in the United States representing prisoners but I always found those two types of work to have a lot of similarities, both in being of course mission-driven, working in mission-driven organizations with colleagues who share core values, but also in the face-to-face work with someone whose story is very different from my story, but with whom I could partner.

Bryan Schwartzman:
None of us ever really knows what's coming next. That's the essence of being human. But right now, it feels like we really, really don't know what's coming next. We're in a time that historians are going to be unpacking whether it's the election season in the United States, whether it's the war between Israel and Hamas. Who knows, by the time this airs, maybe it's escalated to a larger regional war. For the Jewish people as Americans, there's just so much uncertainty. Is there, I don't know, anything in Torah, in your spiritual practice you look to either for yourself or others to just live with such outsized uncertainty?

Maria Pulzetti:
Mm-hmm. We are certainly living in a time of great uncertainty. I could talk about how I ended this essay, and one of the stories that I wanted to leave people with a story of hope is this midrash about the moment when Pharaoh decreed that Jewish baby boys should be killed. There's a midrash that Miriam, who was a child at the time, and Moses wasn't yet born.
Her parents decided to separate because the rationale was they should separate because should any further children be born, the children would have to be killed and that would be so terrible that actually husbands and wives shouldn't live together. Her father, Amram, convinced others to separate from their spouses so that this terrible thing of drowning babies in the Nile wouldn't happen.
Miriam, went to her father, the Midrash teaches, and said if Pharaoh's decree goes forth, we don't know exactly what will happen. Maybe some people will be killed, but if your decree goes forth, no babies will be born at all. She convinced her parents to get back together and ultimately, of course, Moses was born and the story continues. I find that Midrash-

Bryan Schwartzman:
Is Moses's father mentioned in the Torah, or... He is. He doesn't have a speaking line.

Maria Pulzetti:
Ultimately know his name from a different passage. I think in Exodus it's not mentioned, but it comes later. I'm not positive, but we do know his name, yes. From the Torah, we know his name. Mm-hmm. And his mother's name too.
I find that story so hopeful because it's of course a story of resistance led by a young girl at a very, very dark moment for the Jewish people and so when we continually face dark moments, it's empowering and hopeful for me to remember that we have faced extraordinarily difficult challenges before and that there can be a way to come together and move through those and face those challenges and not be alone in them. I continue to be inspired by Miriam and by other heroes of our tradition and hope that those stories can also provide some hope and some inspiration for others.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Like you said, if you move forward, there's at least a chance but if you move backwards or you give up on having children or whatever the positive action is, there's no chance of a better future. Wow, that's a powerful story to end with. Maria Pulzetti, thank you so much for your time and going into your essay and way beyond in this hour. I really appreciated having you on the show.

Maria Pulzetti:
Thank you so much for wanting to be in conversation and for all the work you do at the Evolve to share our stories and so many pieces of wisdom with the broader community.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Thank you so much. We hope to have you again during your rabbinate and we got you out in time for carpool pickups, so we're good.

Maria Pulzetti:
Thank you so much. That's appreciated.

Sam Wachs:
Thank you so much for listening to Bryan's conversation with Maria Pulzetti. Please remember to rate, subscribe, review us wherever you get your podcasts. We are inching towards 50 five star reviews in Apple Podcasts. We'd really like to get there, so if you're listening and you haven't yet reviewed us or given us a five star rating, please do it. It really helps other people find out about the show.
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Finally, be on the lookout for the September Symposium on Democracy from Evolve. We're really excited about it. If you want to know right when it comes out, the best way to do that is to be registered for the Evolve newsletter, which of course is free, which of course, we always have a registration link for the Evolve newsletter in our show notes. You can also easily sign up at evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org, so be on the lookout. That's launching early September, and of course, there's the web conversation which you can register for as well. Thank you so much for listening. We will be back next month with an all new episode.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub, and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song Ilufinu is by Rabbi Miriam Margols. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwarzman, and I will see you next time.