על הבריחה והמציאה ל״דOn Flight and Finding 34
א׳
1[188] Such are the springs of the lower education. Let us now consider the spring of folly, respecting which the Lawgiver has spoken in these terms: “Whosoever shall have slept with a woman in her separation hath unclosed her spring, and she hath unclosed the flow of her blood; let them both be put to death” (Lev. 20:18): he gives to sense-perception the name woman, suggesting Mind as her husband.
ב׳
2[189] Sense-perception is “in separation,” which is “sitting a long way off,” when, having forsaken Mind, her lawful husband, she plants herself on the objects of sense that ensnare and corrupt, and passionately embraces them one after another. At such a time, then, if Mind go to sleep, when he ought to be awake, “he has unclosed the spring” of sense-perception, himself to wit—for, as I have already said, he himself is the spring of sense-perception—that is, he has exposed himself, without covering or wall of defence, to the plots of his enemies.
ג׳
3[190] Moreover she too “unclosed the flow of her blood”; for every sense, in its flow towards the external object of sense, is covered over and drawn in when controlled by reason, but is left destitute when widowed of an upright ruler, and as it is the most grievous evil for a city to be without walls, so is it for a soul to be without a protector.
ד׳
4[191] When, then, is it without a protector? Is it not when sight, spread abroad amid objects of sight, is left uncovered; uncovered too the hearing, flooded by every kind of sound; uncovered the powers of smell and others of like kin, full ready for any experience to which marauding foes may wish to subject them; uncovered again the faculty of speech, giving ill-timed utterance to a thousand things that should have been kept quiet, since there is no one to force back the current? In its unhindered flow it has wrecked great life-projects, which were like ships in fair weather sailing on even keel.
ה׳
5[192] This is the great deluge in which “the cataracts of heaven,” that is of the mind, “were opened,” “and the fountains of the abyss,” that is of sense-perception, “were unclosed” (Gen. 7:11). For only in this way is a deluge brought upon the soul, when as though from heaven, that is the mind, wrongdoings burst upon it as in a cataract; and from sense-perception below, as it were from the earth, passions come welling up.
ו׳
6[193] That is why Moses prohibits the “disclosing of the shame of father and mother” (Lev. 18:7), well knowing how great an evil it is not to keep back and conceal the sins of the mind and of sense-perception, but to make them public as though they were achievements of righteousness.