"These are not great times to be a woman in America," wrote Jennifer Wright in Harper's Bazaar. "At least, not if you are a woman who believes your body is your own." (She wrote those words two years ago. Now is worse.) Most of the women I know live daily with disbelief, anger, anxiety, fear, hopelessness, numbness -- all symptoms of trauma, as it turns out.

It is painful and exhausting to be a woman in America today. Many women, of course, would say that it has always been painful and exhausting to be a woman in America. Women of color, visibly queer women, trans women, immigrant women. The fact that I thought this was a pretty safe place until a few years ago is a sign of how lucky I've been, how good I've always had it. 

It is also painful and exhausting to be a Jew in America today. This week, as it happens, I feel more anxiety about being a woman than about being Jewish. (I'm sure the next synagogue shooting will change that.) Women in America today can't help marinating in a bath of (others') misogyny and (our own) fear. I worry about what that does to our hearts and souls.

I don't often write here about politics, or out of a place of my own anger. Focusing on values and spiritual life is my lifeline. It's part of what keeps me whole. But the worse matters get, the more I fear that my silence is complicity -- and that it's spiritually damaging. I'm hoping that speaking these truths will help me, and maybe others, to work harder toward change. 

In 2016 this nation elected, to the highest office in the land, a man who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy. He proclaimed that when you're a star you can do anything you want. His opponent was smart, tough, experienced... and a woman. You know all of this already. We all know this. The morning after the election, many of us felt like we'd been punched.

Many of us felt, that next morning, as though there had been a referendum on our gender and we had lost. Too many people apparently feel threatened by successful women. They would rather vote for someone with no governance experience (not to mention, someone whose casual misogyny is staggering) than for a woman who has proven herself to be competent.

The Kavanaugh hearings were excruciating for many women, including me. Once again the takeaway was that men's comfort matters more than our safety. Their misbehavior is irrelevant. Women brave enough to admit being victims of sexual misconduct will be mocked, hounded, and threatened with death. Men credibly accused of such misconduct will rise to power.

Today's news is full of abortion bans and draconian heartbeat laws. (Here's where such measures have been passed so far; I suspect the list will grow.) This news shows me that women's bodily integrity, our very personhood, is increasingly at-risk. Men who apparently don't understand the first thing about female biology are legislating away our right to healthcare.

They blithely criminalize miscarriage, already an emotionally excruciating experience for a woman who is trying to conceive. Meanwhile, poor women and women of color will bear the brunt of this new legislation. Those who are poorest -- disproportionately women of color -- are likeliest to be jailed for miscarriage... or to be harmed by "back-alley" abortions.

In privileging the "rights" of the fetus over the rights of the mother, these laws assert that women don't deserve bodily integrity or autonomy. It's as though in this Christian supremacist worldview, women aren't people: we're fetus incubators who shouldn't have the right to make decisions about our own bodies. I don't have adequate words for how dehumanizing that is.

These laws derive from a very particular brand of Christian theology, which in turn makes a set of very particular assumptions about when life begins (conception). But the laws are not only being made for women who share that theology. They're being made for everyone. This is Christian hegemony, and its disregard for religious pluralism is deeply frightening. 

Judaism has an entirely different view than that evangelical Christian one. By and large, mainstream Jewish legal thinking privileges the health of the mother over the fetus. Our legal tradition argues that life begins at birth, with the first breath -- not at conception. The health of the mother, not the fetus, is paramount. Abortion is permitted, even necessary sometimes. 

But lawmakers in Alabama, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio (so far) don't care about that. They don't care about the fact that not all Americans are Christian, or that they're legislating their theology onto the bodies of people who don't necessarily share it. And that scares me both as a woman and as a Jew. That feels like we're falling down the slippery slope toward Christian theocracy.

It is painful and exhausting to be a woman in America today. And I know I have it easy, comparatively speaking. I'm white, which means I'm not navigating the constant barrage of micro- and macro-aggressions that come with being a person of color. I'm not an immigrant or a refugee. I'm not transgender. I'm not in danger of having my child stripped of citizenship. 

I'm just a woman. Living, as most of us do these days, with anxiety and fear. Surfing the toxic waves of constant debate about whether or not I deserve healthcare or the right to make decisions about my own body. And facing the reality that for many of the white (mostly male) Christians in positions of power in this country today, the answer to those questions is no.

So what am I going to do? Tomorrow night, thank God, Shabbat arrives. I will aim to set this anguish and grief aside, and to live for one day in the "as-if" -- as if the world were already redeemed; as if people weren't trying to strip women of our rights. And then when the new week begins, I will do what I can to protect all who are vulnerable, and to work toward a better world. 

Related: What You Can Do To Help Women in States With Extreme Abortion Bans, at The Cut.

Image by durantelallera [source].