על יוסף כ״בOn Joseph 22
א׳
1[125] But since it is our purpose to examine the more allegorical meaning after the literal, I must say what is needful on that also. Perhaps some of the more thoughtless will laugh at my words; but I will say quite plainly that the statesman is most certainly an interpreter of dreams, not one of the parasites, nor one of the praters who shew off their cleverness for hire and use their art of interpreting the visions given in sleep as a pretext for making money; but one who is accustomed to judge with exactness that great general universal dream which is dreamt not only by the sleeping but also by the waking.
ב׳
2[126] This dream in veriest truth is human life: for, just as in the visions of sleep, seeing we see not, hearing we hear not, tasting and touching we neither taste nor touch, speaking we speak not, walking we walk not, and the other motions which we make or postures we adopt we do not make or adopt at all, but they are empty creations of the mind which without any basis of reality produces pictures and images of things which are not, as though they were, so, too, the visions and imaginations of our waking hours resemble dreams. They come; they go; they appear; they speed away; they fly off before we can securely grasp them;
ג׳
3[127] let every man search into his own heart and he will test the truth of this at first hand, with no need of proof from me, especially if he is now advanced in years. This is he who was once a babe, after this a boy, then a lad, then a stripling, then a young man, then a grown man and last an old man.
ד׳
4[128] But where are all these gone? Has not the baby vanished in the boy, the boy in the lad, the lad in the stripling, the stripling in the youth, the youth in the man, the man in the old man, while on old age follows death?
ה׳
5[129] Perhaps, indeed, each of the stages, as it resigns its rule to its successor, dies an anticipatory death, nature thus silently teaching us not to fear the death which ends all, since we have borne so easily the earlier deaths:—that of the babe, of the boy, of the lad, of the stripling, of the man, who are all no more when old age has come.