על החלומות, ספר א כ׳On Dreams, Book I 20
א׳
1[120] We read next that “he took one of the stones of the place and set it under his head, and slept in that place” (Gen. 28:11). Our admiration is extorted not only by the lawgiver’s allegorical and philosophical teaching, but by the way in which the literal narrative inculcates the practice of toil and endurance.
ב׳
2[121] For he does not deem it worthy of one whose heart is set upon virtue to fare sumptuously and live a life of luxury affecting the tastes and ambitions of people who are called fortunate but are in reality laden with ill-fortune, whose whole life in the eyes of the most holy lawgiver is a sleep and a dream.
ג׳
3[122] In the daytime these people, when they have got through their outrages upon other men in law-courts, and council-chambers, and theatres, and everywhere, come home, poor wretches, to ruin their own abode, not that which consists of buildings, but the abode which is bound up by nature with the soul, I mean the body. Into it they convey an unlimited supply of eatables one after another, and steep it in quantities of strong drink, until the reasoning faculty is drowned, and the sensual passions born of excess are aroused and raging with a fury that brooks no check, after falling upon and entangling themselves with all whom they meet, have disgorged their great frenzy and have abated.
ד׳
4[123] At night, when it is time to retire to bed, they recline exceedingly delicately on costly couches and gaily-coloured bedding with which they have provided themselves, aping the luxury of women to whom nature allows an easier mode of life, agreeable to the body of softer stamp which the Creator Artificer has wrought for them.
ה׳
5[124] None such is a disciple of the holy Word, but only those who are really men, enamoured of moderation, propriety, and self-respect: men who have laid down as the foundation, so to speak, of their whole life self-control, abstemiousness, endurance, which are safe roadsteads of the soul, in which it can lie firmly moored and out of danger; men superior to the temptations of money, pleasure, popularity, regardless of meat and drink and of the actual necessaries of life, so long as lack of food does not begin to threaten their health; men perfectly ready for the sake of acquiring virtue to submit to hunger and thirst and heat and cold and all else that is hard to put up with; men keen to get things most easily procured, who are never ashamed of an inexpensive cloak, but on the contrary regard those which cost much as matter for reproach and a great waste of their living.
ו׳
6[125] To these men a soft bit of ground is a costly couch; bushes, grass, shrubs, a heap of leaves, their bedding; their pillow some stones or mounds rising a little above the general level. Such a mode of life as this the luxurious call hard faring, but those who live for what is good and noble describe it as most pleasant; for it is suited to those who are not merely called but really are men.
ז׳
7[126] Do you not see how, in the passage before us, the lawgiver represents the athlete of noble pursuits, in enjoyment of a princely abundance of materials for comfort, as sleeping on the ground, and using a stone as his pillow, and a little later in his prayers asking for nature’s wealth, bread and raiment (Gen. 28:20)? For he ever held up to ridicule the wealth which depends on the vain opinions of men, and scoffed at those who regarded it with reverence. In him we have the original pattern of the practiser’s soul, one at war with every man that is effeminate and emasculated.