Q:
Since the religions of the nations are falsehoods, so what remains for them to follow?
A:
The nations of the world have a big Shulchan Aruch; they have a big Torah – they don’t need our Torah. And their Torah is divided into two parts. One is called the sheva mitzvos Bnei Noach, the commandments of the sons of Noach. It’s a very big Torah and goyim who want to study it have to come to Jews to study that Torah because they don’t know that Torah. It’s a big Torah, the sheva mitzvos, and it’s not necessary to be a Jew. If you keep that Torah correctly, with devotion, with chassidus, so can also be also be zoicheh to Olam Habah. חסידי אומות העולם יש להם חלק לעולם הבא. Of course it’s not that easy – you have to be a chossid in the sheva mitzvos Bnei Noach; you have to be devoted to it, but it’s possible to get Olam Habah; no question about it.
However, there is another torah and that’s a Torah of seichel. Everybody has a torah in his mind. Hakodosh Boruch Hu put into our minds a conscience that teaches us to a big extent what’s right and what’s wrong. The only trouble is people don’t listen to that conscience – they listen to misleaders. They listen to the literature; to the wicked writers and to people who are trying to deceive the world.
But your conscience tells you the truth – more or less you understand what’s right and what’s wrong. Even the Soviets who are enemies of the Torah, but in the Soviet Russia, they don’t countenance any public statues for homosexuals. Mayor Koch in New York City wants to put up a statue in honor of homosexuals and yet in Moscow they wouldn’t think of such a thing. How could that be? The answer is, in Moscow they are following their common sense – it’s common sense that this is perversion and corruption. But here, they are misled by the wicked literature and they are so stupid that they think that homosexuality is an ideal.
In Moscow, it’s common sense if somebody commits a crime he has to be punished severely and therefore you can walk through the streets of Moscow at night and you are relatively safe; whereas here, it’s a question whether you can walk on some streets even by day.
So common sense teaches Mankind what’s right. Common sense says: שופך דם האדם באדם דמו יישפך. Common sense says that a murderer must be put to death. Everybody has a right to live, but a person forfeits that right by taking somebody else’s life. It’s common sense – that’s how Mankind always existed.
Now, when I say common sense, I’m not talking about corrupted common sense. The original common sense of Mankind was to a big extent a reliable guide. Of course it’s not perfectly true, but to a big extent, it’s a reliable guide.
And so to sum up – the gentiles have available to them two kinds of Torah. One is the Torah which we call the Noachide Laws, the sheva mitzvos Bnei Noach. If they are interested, they should come to us and we’ll tell them what those laws are. If they don’t want to hear them and they want to abide by the laws of their common sense conscience, it’s also something – it’s not as good, but it’s something – and it can help people live a more or less balanced and happy existence in this world.
TAPE # 402