על החלומות, ספר ב ל״זOn Dreams, Book II 37
א׳
1[245] It is this Word which one of Moses’ company compared to a river, when he said in the Psalms “the river of God is full of water” (Ps. 65(64):10); where surely it were senseless to suppose that the words can properly refer to any of the rivers of earth. No, he is representing the Divine Word as full of the stream of wisdom, with no part of it empty or devoid of itself but a …, as it has been called, filled through and through with the influx and lifted up on high by the constant never-failing outflow from that perennial fountain.
ב׳
2[246] And there is another psalm which runs thus: “The strong current of the river makes glad the city of God” (Ps. 66(65):4). What city? For the existing holy city, where the sacred temple also is, does not stand in the neighbourhood of rivers any more than of the sea. Thus it is clear that he writes to shew us allegorically something different from the obvious.
ג׳
3[247] It is perfectly true that the impetuous rush of the divine word borne along 〈swiftly〉 and ceaselessly with its strong and ordered current does overflow and gladden the whole universe through and through.
ד׳
4[248] For God’s city is the name in one sense for the world which has received the whole bowl, wherein the divine draught is mixed, and feasted thereon and exultingly taken for its possession the gladness which remains for all time never to be removed or quenched. In another sense he uses this name for the soul of the Sage, in which God is said to walk as in a city. For “I will walk in you,” he says, “and will be your God” (Lev. 26:12).
ה׳
5[249] And, when the happy soul holds out the sacred goblet of its own reason, who is it that pours into it the holy cupfuls of true gladness, but the Word, the Cup-bearer of God and Master of the feast, who is also none other than the draught which he pours—his own self free from all dilution, the delight, the sweetening, the exhilaration, the merriment, the ambrosian drug (to take for our own use the poet’s terms) whose medicine gives joy and gladness?