re: #46 Alouette

I had this discussion with a rabbi yesterday. In Kares you are cut off from your people—meaning your ancestors, and your contemporaries. You’ve heard the phrase ‘Gd, the Jewish people, and Israel are one’, right? Well, if you cease being who you are, and the essence of who you are is in that covenant—

This is a serious consequence to our actions. If you explore the implications of this, it’s fearsome. All because, for whatever reason, you cannot feel remorse over certain actions.

Like I said above, it’s translated with numbness, kept away longer than arm’s distance. We therefore can’t feel or visualize the world that is being described—and unfortunately, we can’t feel who we are. At each point where the external world is described through law, our internal universe is also being described. Our institutions have failed to hammer home this connection. And so we walk along with our pilot light turned way too low, not enough to make a bigger spark. It’s a problem, to say the least.

It gets down to this question—if you view yourself a person who happens to be Jewish, then Kares ain’t no big deal. But if you view yourself as a Jewish human being, then if it weren’t for saving nature teshuva, you’d prefer death over Kares.