על החלומות, ספר ב מ״בOn Dreams, Book II 42
א׳
1[274] Such is the most fitting rule for speaking and keeping silence. But the practice of the wicked is quite the contrary. For they ardently pursue a guilty silence and a reprehensible speech, and they work both as an engine for the ruin of themselves and others.
ב׳
2[275] Yet it is in speech—in saying what they ought not—that they exercise themselves the most. For they open their mouths and leave them unbridled, and suffer their “promiscuous” speech, to use the poet’s term, to take its course like an unchecked torrent whirling along with it vast quantities of unprofitable stuff.
ג׳
3[276] And so some betake themselves to pleading the cause of pleasure and lust and of every superabundant appetite and raise up unreasoning passion to menace the ruling reason. 〈Others 〉 disencumber themselves to engage in disputatious controversies, hoping thereby to blind the race of vision and to be able to hurl them over precipices and chasms, from which they can never rise again.
ד׳
4[277] Some, too, have set themselves up to oppose the virtue not only of men but of God; to such a pitch of madness have they advanced.
ה׳
5The first of these three, the company of the pleasure-lovers, are described as having for their leader the king of the country of Egypt. For God says to the prophet, “Behold he himself goeth forth to the water, and thou shalt stand meeting him by the edge (lip) of the river” (Ex. 7:15).
ו׳
6[278] It is as characteristic of him, that he should ever go out to the spreading tide of unreasoning passion, as it is of the wise to meet its strong current, whose waters are the advocacy of pleasure and lust—meet it not with his feet, but with his judgement, steadfastly and unswervingly, on the “lip” of the river, that is on the mouth and tongue, the organs of speech. For firmly resting on these supports he will be able to overthrow and lay low the plausibilities which plead the cause of passion.
ז׳
7[279] Secondly, we find the enemy of the race that has vision in the people of Pharaoh who attacked and persecuted and enslaved virtue without ceasing, until they received the requital of evil for the evil they meted out to others, submerged in the sea of their wrongdoings and in the mighty billows, which their raving had called up, and thus that occasion brought a peerless spectacle, an undisputed victory, and a joy which transcendedhope.
ח׳
8[280] Therefore we read: “Israel saw the Egyptians dead along the lip of the sea” (Ex. 14:30). Mighty is that champion arm by whose constraining force mouth and lips and speech became the scene of the fall of those who had whetted them as instruments against the truth, that so their own weapons, not those of strangers, should bring death to those who had taken them against others.
ט׳
9[281] Three messages, the best of tidings, does this text proclaim to the soul, one that the passions of Egypt have perished, a second that the scene of their death is none other than the lips of that fountain bitter and briny as the sea, those very lips through which poured forth the sophist-talk which wars against virtue, and finally that their ruin was seen.
י׳
10[282] For we may pray that nothing that is good and beautiful should be unseen, but rather should be brought into clear light and bright sunshine, while its opposite evil deserves only to be brought into night and profound darkness and 〈night〉. And never may even a casual glimpse of evil come our way, but may the good be surveyed with ever growing eyesight. And what is so truly good as that the excellent should live and the bad die?
