Why do bad things happen to good people? This basic moral and religious problem comes up several times in the Talmud, because it is unavoidable for anyone who thinks about Jewish law. Most legal codes include clearly defined punishments for infractions—fines, jail time, or in the worst cases, capital punishment. In Tractate Sanhedrin, the rabbis, too, take up questions of how crimes should be punished. But throughout the Talmud, it often remains unclear exactly how the laws are supposed to be enforced. Some crimes are punishable by lashes; but in the absence of a Jewish government, who is to administer them? Others, like idol worship, call for execution; but the Talmud itself boasts that in the days of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court of the Second Temple period, death sentences were almost never enforced.
Instead, for the worst crimes—such as deliberate violation of Shabbat—the Talmud usually declares that the punishment is karet, being "cut off." In the Torah, the word seems to imply ostracism—being cut off from the life of the tribe. But to the rabbis, karet is a vaguer concept that suggests a punishment enforced directly by God, instead of human beings. This can mean dying young or childless, but most of the time it is taken to refer to a posthumous punishment—the soul is cut off from God in the world to come. This is one of the concepts that distinguish the Talmudic worldview from the Torah's, where there is no mention of reward or punishment after death, only prosperity or suffering in this world.
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