Original content

English translation

The prophets said: "The ugly and ill omen draws its sustenance from within your souls. If you were sleeping somewhere in peril, a dragon advancing upon you from above your head, a kindness would alert you: 'Leap up at once, or the dragon devours you!' Would you say: 'Why do you cast an ill omen?' 'What omen? Leap up! Look in the light! Through this very ill omen I myself am saving you, bearing you toward home.' For the prophet is one who awakens from the hidden— who has seen what the people of the world could not see. If a physician tells you: 'Do not eat sour grapes, for such a sickness raises tumult and harm,' would you say: 'Why do you cast an ill omen?' Then you are branding the sincere counselor a sinner. And if an astrologer tells you: 'Today, in no way undertake such an enterprise in your preparations,' even if you find the stellar prediction false a hundred times, when once or twice it comes true, you accept it. 'Our astronomy has never gone contrary— how does its soundness remain sheathed from you?' That physician and that astrologer warn from conjecture; we ourselves warn from direct vision. We see the smoke and the fire from the horizon bearing down in assault upon the deniers. Yet you say: 'Be silent, cease this speech, for this ill-omened talk is our undoing.' O you who will not hear the counsel of counselors, the ill omen is with you wherever you go. A viper climbs upon your back; someone sees it from a rooftop and warns you. You say to him: 'Be quiet, do not sadden me.' He says: 'Very well, be at ease'— and lets the matter go. When the viper strikes its mouth against your neck, all your joy-seeking turns to bitterness. Then you say to him: 'Was it this, O such-a-one? Why did you not rend your collar in lamentation? Or why did you not throw a stone at me from above, so that you might have shown me seriousness and aroused me?' He says: 'Because you showed irritation.' You say: 'You would have done me good and gladdened me.' He said: 'I acted with noble generosity through counsel, to free you from this hard bondage. Through baseness you did not recognize that right, and made it the occasion for injury and transgression.' This is the nature of the vile and base: they do you ill when you do them good. Keep the nafs bowed and bent through patience, for it is base and is not reformed by kindness. If you do a kindness to a generous soul, it is fitting— for one, he gives back seven hundred in return. When you treat the base one with force and harshness, he becomes your slave, most faithful. The unbelievers sow oppression amid blessing; then in Hell their cry is "Rabbanā!"— "Our Lord!"