על החוקים לפרטיהם, ספר ב ל״גOn the Special Laws, Book II 33
א׳
1[204] The last of the annual feasts, called Tabernacles, recurs at the autumn equinox. From this we may draw two morals. The first is, that we should honour equality and hate inequality, for the former is the source and fountain of justice, the latter of injustice. The former is akin to open sunlight, the latter to darkness. The second moral is, that after all the fruits are made perfect, it is our duty to thank God Who brought them to perfection and is the source of all good things.
ב׳
2[205] For autumn, or after-fruitage, is, as also the name clearly implies, the season after the ripe fruit has been gathered in, when the sown crops and the fruit-trees have paid their annual toll and bounden tribute, and the land has richly provided all that it yields for the sustenance of the various kinds of animals without number, both tame and wild, sustenance not only to be enjoyed on the spot and for the moment, but also in the future, through the foresight of nature, the friend of all that lives.
ג׳
3[206] Further, the people are commanded, during the time of the feast, to dwell in tents. The reason of this may be that the labour of the husbandmen no longer requires that they should live in the open air, as nothing is now left unprotected but all the fruits are stored in silos or similar places to escape the damage which often ensues through the blazing sunshine or storms of rain.
ד׳
4[207] For when the crops which feed us are standing in the open field, you can only watch and guard the food so necessary to you, by coming out and not shutting yourself up like a woman who never stirs outside her quarters. And if while you remain in the open air you encounter extreme cold or heat, you have the thick growth of the trees waiting to shade you, and sheltered under them you can easily escape injury from either source. But when all the fruits are being gathered in, come in yourself also to seek a more weatherproof mode of life and hope for rest in place of the toils which you endured when labouring on the land.
ה׳
5Another reason may be, that it should remind us of the long journeyings of our forefathers in the depths of the desert, when at every halting-place they spent many a year in tents.
ו׳
6[208] And indeed it is well in wealth to remember your poverty, in distinction your insignificance, in high offices your position as a commoner, in peace your dangers in war, on land the storms on sea, in cities the life of loneliness. For there is no pleasure greater than in high prosperity to call to mind old misfortunes.
ז׳
7[209] But besides giving pleasure, it is a considerable help in the practice of virtue. For people who having had both good and ill before their eyes have rejected the ill and are enjoying the good, necessarily fall into a grateful frame of mind and are urged to piety by the fear of a change to the reverse, and also therefore in thankfulness for their present blessings they honour God with songs and words of praise and beseech Him and propitiate Him with supplications that they may never repeat the experience of such evils.
ח׳
8[210] Again, the beginning of this feast comes on the fifteenth day of the month for the same reason as was given when we were speaking of the season of spring, namely that the glorious light which nature gives should fill the universe not only by day but also by night, because on that day the sun and moon rise in succession to each other with no interval between their shining, which is not divided by any borderland of darkness.
ט׳
9[211] As a crown to the seven days he adds an eighth, which he calls the “closing,” not meaning apparently that it is the closing of that feast only, but also of all the yearly feasts which I have enumerated and described. For it is the last in the year and forms its conclusion.
י׳
10[212] Perhaps also the number eight, the first cubic number, was assigned to the feast for the following reason: it is the beginning of the higher category of solids, marking where we pass from the unsubstantial and bring to its conclusion the category of the conceptual which rises to the solid in the scale of ascending powers.
י״א
11[213] And indeed the autumn festival, being as I have said a sort of complement and conclusion of all the feasts in the year, seems to have more stability and fixity, because the people have now received their returns from the land and are no longer perplexed and terrified by doubts as to its fertility or barrenness. For the anxious thoughts of the husbandman are never settled till the crops are gathered in, so numberless are the men and animals from whom they are liable to suffer harm.
י״ב
12[214] All this long exposition is due to my regard for the sacred seventh day, and my wish to shew that all the yearly feasts prove to be as it were the children of that number which stands as a mother … scenes of folly and joy … and because the festal assemblies and the cheerful life which they afford bring delights that are free from all anxiety and dejection, and spread exhilaration both in the body and in the soul, in the body by the comfortable way of living, in the soul by the study of philosophy.