Tardemah
…Abram falls into the dread of a deep sleep called tardemah [Genesis 15]…Adam fell into a tardemah when God removed his rib and built him a wife.… Now Abram falls into a tardemah so that a prophecy can be extracted from him….What links Abram’s tardemah to that of Adam? — Rabbi Daniel Nevins
I.
The harmony of the garden,
God’s dream for humans,
His masterwork
Disrupted,
Flawed by something he seems
To have overlooked—
Loneliness.
Adam’s complaint
After the naming project’s complete,
None suitable, no one to share
Companionship.
The solution: the deep sleep of
Tardemah, proto-anesthesia
For a “ribectomy,” key to human
Partnership.
II.
Abram and prophecy,
Legacy of a dangerous friendship:
El-Shaddai, mountain deity—
Nomad
Companion, wilderness tribal god,
Partner in the trek from Ur,
Purveyor of promises
In doubt when old age denies
Progeny.
Is to err divine? Or Chaldean?
Ur’s pilgrim, would-be
Patriarch
Questions the pledged
Inheritance
Unknown, impossible,
‘Til in tardemah-sleep,
Covenant,
Name-sharing, like old Adam’s
Project, power shared,
Split carcasses portend
Centuries of suffering,
Pogrom and Shoah,
History of blood-
Promise,
And in the sleep and darkness—
Faith.
III.
My family shares a hidden legacy,
Exiles and transplants and immigrants,
Grandpa Jacob Friedmann’s secret story,
Orphaned, christened into a new covenant—
Ancestor
Whose unknown tale of persecution,
Kulturkampf, the shared narratives
Blending into the German melting-pot
On the Ohio, Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati.
Lists of names in the old Bible,
Baptismal ledgers,
Weddings,
Graves—
Us,
With only faces,
Eyes and foreheads
Repeating in generations,
Carrying the hidden seeds of
The ancient nomad and his faith-
Gift
To unwrap and pass on—
Family
Born in myth and mystery—
Tardemah.
