אליגוריות החוקים, ספר ב י״זAllegorical Interpretation of Genesis, Book II 17
א׳
1[65] Let us look again at the words, “they were not ashamed.” The words suggest three points for consideration: shamelessness, and shamefastness, and absence of both shamelessness and shamefastness. Shamelessness, then, is peculiar to the worthless man, shamefastness to the man of worth, to feel neither shamefastness nor shamelessness to the man who is incapable of right apprehension and of due assent thereto, and this man is at this moment the prophet’s subject. For he who has not yet attained to the apprehension of good and evil cannot possibly be either shameless or shamefast.
ב׳
2[66] Examples of shamelessness are all those unseemly actions, when the mind uncovers shameful things which it ought to hide from view, and vaunts itself in them and prides itself on them. Even in the case of Miriam, when she spoke against Moses, it is said, “If her father had but spat in her face, should she not feel shame seven days?” (Numb. 12:14).
ג׳
3[67] For veritably shameless and bold was sense-perception in daring to decry and find fault with Moses for that for which he deserved praise. In comparison with him, who was “faithful in all God’s house” (ibid.), sense-perception was set at naught by the God and Father; and it was God Himself who wedded to Moses the Ethiopian woman, who stands for resolve unalterable, intense, and fixed. For this Moses merits high eulogy, that he took to him the Ethiopian woman, even the nature that has been tried by fire and cannot be changed. For, even as in the eye the part that sees is black, so the soul’s power of vision has the title of woman of Ethiopia.
ד׳
4[68] Why then, seeing that results of wickedness are many, has he mentioned only one, that which attends on conduct that is disgraceful, saying “they were not shamed,” but not saying “they did not commit injustice,” or “they did not sin,” or “they did not err”? The reason is not far to seek. By the only true God I deem nothing so shameful as supposing that I exert my mind and senses.
ה׳
5[69] My own mind the author of its exertion? How can it be? Does it know as to itself, what it is or how it came into existence? Sense-perception the origin of the perceiving by sense? How could it be said to be so, seeing that it is beyond the ken either of itself or of the mind? Do you not observe that the mind which thinks that it exercises itself is often found to be without mental power, in scenes of gluttony, drunkenness, folly? Where does the exercise of mind show itself then? And is not perceptive sense often robbed of the power of perceiving? There are times when seeing we see not and hearing hear not, whenever the mind, breaking off its attention for a moment, is brought to bear on some other mental object.
ו׳
6[70] So long then as they are naked, the mind without self-exertion, the perceptive sense without perceiving, they have nothing shameful: but when they have begun to apprehend, they fall into shameful and wanton conduct, for they will be found often showing silliness and folly rather than healthy knowledge, not only in times of loathsome surfeit and depression and mad fooling but also in the rest of their life. For when bodily sense is in command, the mind is in a state of slavery heeding none of its proper objects; but when the mind is in the ascendant, the bodily sense is seen to have nothing to do and to be powerless to lay hold of any object of sense-perception.