Gentiles and yetzer hara

imasoftov

Thu, Jan 10 2019, 11:28 am

Non-Jews are allowed to have relations outside marriage. Their list of arayot is a bit shorter than ours, but similar (including like us adultery where it only matters if the woman is married, but not the man) even if it's preferable that they get married. But still, it seems to me that the s-xual drive is the same in all humans.

To explan, I don't think the drive for pleasure is a force for evil. It's just that much of what's forbidden is things that one might otherwise do, even if one engaged in them, as with other permitted pleasures, with restraint. I don't think that Chazal call it the yetzer hara because it's a little voice in your head saying "sin", it's a part of you (it's actually you) that says "I'm hungry" and doesn't care if it's kosher or not. Likewise there isn't a little voice in your head saying "don't sin", you have, if you studied Torah (I'm not distinguishing here whether you've learned from primary sources or not), been taught to restrain your drives when commanded.

But then I don't think there are forces for evil, except for us, if we allow ourselves to be such. There is a force for good, but it's not as that present in the world as we want, and we have to step up and fill in the gaps. That was true even before Hester Panim, there were still problems that we had to help each other with, the laws of tzedaka and gemillut chasadim were around previously. While it's a recent statement (R Moshe Leib of Sassov lived from 1745 to 1807 which is not so long ago in our history) to say that what we can learn from denial of G-d is that we must help each other as if there was no other source of help, that was as true on the way home from Matan Torah as it is today, even if no one said anything of the sort for millenia.