על הכרובים כ״זOn the Cherubim 27
א׳
1Now we showed that keeping festival pertained to Him and therefore we see that all such festivals, whether they be weekly sabbaths or (the occasional) feasts, are His, who is the Cause, and pertain not to any man at all.
ב׳
2[91] Let us consider our famous festal assemblies. Different nations, whether Greek or barbarian, have their own, the product of myth and fiction, and their only purpose is empty vanity. We need not dwell on them, for the whole of human life would not suffice to tell in detail of the follies inherent in them. Yet, without overstepping the right limit, a few words, to serve for many, may be said to cover them all.
ג׳
3[92] In every feast and gathering in our country what is it that men admire and seek so eagerly? Freedom from the fear of punishment, from sense of restraint, from stress of business; drunkenness, tipsy rioting, routs and revels, wantonness, debauchery; lovers thronging their mistresses’ doors, nightlong carouses, unseemly pleasures, daylight chamberings, deeds of insolence and outrage, hours spent in training to be intemperate, in studying to be fools, in cultivating baseness, wholesale depravation of all that is noble: the works to which nature prompts us are turned upside down: men keep vigil by night to indulge their insatiable lust: the day time, the hours given for wakefulness, they spend in sleep.
ד׳
4[93] At such times virtue is jeered at as mischievous, vice snatched at as profitable. At such times right actions are dishonoured, wrong actions honoured. At such times music, philosophy, all culture, those truly divine images set in the divinely given soul, are mute. Only the arts which pander and minister pleasure to the belly and the organs below it are vocal and loud-voiced.
