This week I had one of the most frightening dreams of my life. In it, I was severed from everyone I had ever known or loved—not merely alone, but cast into an emptiness beyond light, beyond warmth, beyond relationship itself. It was a darkness with no floor beneath it, a place where love could not reach and meaning simply stopped. The terror was not solitude, but the sense of being abandoned by the entire structure of life—cut off from companionship, from safety, from purpose, and from any possibility of return.

In that moment, the dream felt like a kind of spiritual death: not the end of the body, but the dread that everything we build, love, and become could vanish into nothing. It was a vision of being unmade, not by pain, but by disconnection.

That is why the Torah’s concept of karet came to mind so powerfully. Karet is often understood as one of the gravest punishments in the Torah, not because it necessarily means physical suffering, but because it means being cut off—from G-d, from covenant, from holiness, and from others. It means being severed from belonging, abandoned, alone, and cut off from the source of life itself. The dream gave that idea emotional force. It showed me, in a way words never could, that the worst punishment is not suffering in the body, but separation in the soul.

For the Jewish people, that same idea exists not only on an individual level but on a national one. The Torah warns that the land itself can “spit out” the people if they abandon the covenant. Exile is the national form of karet: to be........

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