Hot take: I Just lost my fear of kareth by thinking about the mikveh

I’m sorry if this is inflammatory, but I don’t know how else to put this.

All this time I’ve been urging myself to get on the right side of the keritot. Shabbat is a matter of kareth, I tell myself, so get with the program! No more driving! Then I realized something: No one I know actually acts like they believe in kareth.

Even among the small minority of Jews who profess such belief (and excluding some Chabad rabbis who say it’s temporary and reparable, in which case it doesn’t mean what it means), all I see is an establishment that uses the mikveh as a carrot and stick to keep Jewish women under control.

If I believed with emunah shleimah that skipping the mikveh meant kareth, I would build a mikveh with my own money, hire a woman to run it, and start dunking every Jewish woman (or every woman, depending on your interpretation of the halakha) who had free time during lunch, no questions asked.

Instead, whether they realize this or not, Orthodox rabbis are playing God by conditioning access to the mikveh, and thus the fate of Jewish women’s souls, on their willingness to marry Jewish men (like themselves), a law enacted by rabbis (like themselves), instead of giving priority to a law they claim was received by Moshe Rabbeinu (who, it should be noted, did not marry within the tribe).