על החלומות, ספר ב ט״וOn Dreams, Book II 15
א׳
1[100] Therefore they will boldly say: “Wilt thou indeed be king and king it over us, or dost thou fail to know that we are not self-ruling but under the kingship of an immortal king, the one and only God? Wilt thou indeed be lord and lord it over us? Are we not under a master, and have we not and shall we not have for ever the same lord, bondage to whom gives us more joy than his freedom does to any other?” For of all things that are held in honour in this world of creation bondage to God is the best.
ב׳
2[101] So I myself would pray that I might hold firmly to their judgements, for they are the scouts, the watchers, the overseers of mental facts, not of material things, strict in censorship, never failing in soberness, thus no more misled by the lures which so commonly deceive.
ג׳
3[102] But hitherto I have been as a drunken man beset by constant uncertainty, and like the blind I need staff and guiding hands, for had I a staff to lean on I might perhaps be saved from stumbling or slipping.
ד׳
4[103] But those who know themselves to be lacking in self-testing and thoughtfulness and yet do not take pains to follow those who have tested and thought out everything with care, those who know the road of which they themselves are ignorant, may be sure that they are pinned amid impassable ravines and with all their efforts will be unable to advance further.
ה׳
5[104] And I, when the drunken fit abates a little, am in such close alliance with them that I take their friends for my friends and their enemies for my enemies. Indeed, even in my present state I will reject and hate the dreamer because they hate him; and no one of sense can blame me for this because the votes and decisions of the majority must always prevail.
ו׳
6[105] But when he changes his life for the better and renounces his idle visions, his troublous crawling and cringing amid the vain fantasies of the vainglorious, and the dreams of night and darkness and the chance issues of things vague and obscure;
ז׳
7[106] when he rises from his deep slumbering to abiding wakefulness and welcomes clearness before uncertainty, truth before false supposition, day before night, light before darkness; when moved by a yearning for continence and a vast zeal for piety he rejects bodily pleasure, the wife of the Egyptian, as she bids him come in to her and enjoy her embraces (Gen. 39:7);
ח׳
8[107] when he claims the goods of his kinsmen and father from which he seemed to have been disinherited and holds it his duty to recover that portion of virtue which falls to his lot; when he passes step by step from betterment to betterment and, established firmly as it were on the crowning heights and consummation of his life, utters aloud the lesson which experience had taught him so fully, “I belong to God” (Gen. 50:19), and not any longer to any sense object that has been created,
ט׳
9[108]—then his brethren will make with him covenants of reconciliation, changing their hatred to friendship, their ill-will to good-will, and I, their follower and their servant, who have learnt to obey them as masters, will not fail to praise him for his repentance.
י׳
10[109] And with good reason too, since Moses the revealer preserves from destruction the story of his repentance, so worthy of love and remembrance, under the symbol of the bones which he held should not be suffered to remain buried for ever in Egypt (Ex. 13:19). For he deemed it a grievous shame to suffer any fair blossom of the soul to be withered or flooded and drowned by the streams which the Egyptian river of passion, the body, pours forth unceasingly through the channel of all the senses.”