על הזיווג לשם ההשכלה (על לימודי היסוד) י״בOn Mating with the Preliminary Studies 12
א׳
1[58] And elsewhere we have this text, graven as on a stone, “When the Highest divided the nations, when He dispersed the sons of Adam” (Deut. 32:8), that is, when He drove away all the earthly ways of thinking which have no real desire to look on any heaven-sent good, and made them homeless and cityless, scattered in very truth. For none of the wicked have preserved for them home or city, nor aught else that tends to fellowship, but they are scattered without settlement, driven about on every side, ever changing their place, nowhere able to hold their ground.
ב׳
2[59] So then the wicked man begets vice by his legitimate wife and passion by his concubine. For the soul as a whole is the legitimate life-mate of reason, and if it be a soul of guilt it brings forth vices. The bodily nature is the concubine, and we see that through it passion is generated, for the body is the region of pleasures and lusts.
ג׳
3[60] This concubine is called Timna, whose name translated is “tossing faintness.” For the soul faints and loses all power through passion when it receives from the body the flood of tossing surge caused by the storm wind which sweeps down in its fury, driven on by unbridled appetite.
ד׳
4[61] And of all the members of the clan here described Esau is the progenitor, the head as it were of the whole creature,—Esau whose name we sometimes interpret as “an oak,” sometimes as “a thing made up.” He is an oak because he is unbending, unyielding, disobedient and stiff-necked by nature, with folly as his counsellor, oak-like in very truth; he is a thing made up because the life that consorts with folly is just fiction and fable, full of the bombast of tragedy on the one hand and of the broad jesting of comedy on the other; it has nothing sound about it, is utterly false and has thrown truth overboard; it makes no account of the nature which is outside qualities and forms and fashionings, the nature which the Man of Practice loves.
ה׳
5[62] To this Moses testifies when he says, “Jacob was a plain or unfashioned man, living in a house” (Gen. 25:27). And therefore Esau his opposite must be houseless, and the friend of fiction and makeup and legendary follies, or rather himself the actor’s stage and the playwright’s legend.