Parashat Lech Lecha Genesis 12:1-17:27

Haftarah Isaiah 40:27-41:16

Dear TBE Community,

The day olive trees breathed deeply

and the hills learned again to dance like lambs

I saw my son’s face when I was alone.

I was so alone that I saw.

Sleep in me, said the landscape, sleep, sleep.

I saw birds flying up and birds flying down

as when people leave you

and others come in their stead.

I saw men sitting in their homes

crying: “I want to go home!”

with the calm faces of men sitting

in their homes.

Sleep in me, said the landscape, sleep, sleep.

This poem by Yehuda Amichai, titled #60 in his volume “Time,” has a mysterious, almost surreal feel to me. In fact, when I visualize the words, I see a landscape as from a Salvador Dalí painting. For example, The Persistence of Memory, with melting clocks on a deserted mountain plateau and in the background, a clear, bright patch of sea and sky drawing the attention.  

The title of the Dalí painting might even offer an explanation – fluid, surreal – for Amichai’s enigmatic lines about the men sitting in their homes longing to go home “with faces of men sitting in their homes.” Memories of places persist, and sometimes, the longing for what one has left behind is as strong – as clear and bright – as the longing for something that is near and present yet has not fully materialized.

Every time I read this Amichai poem, I think of Abraham, the figure that fully emerges in this week’s parsha, Lech Lecha. The man who felt called to leave his country, his culture, and his father’s house and venture out to the west, to become one with the land that God showed him.

A passage more surreal than Dalí’s painting and more enigmatic than Amichai’s poem takes place in Genesis 15, when God cuts the Covenant of the Pieces with Abraham.

“And God said to him: I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land to inherit.” And he said: “O my Master Adonai how shall I know that I shall inherit it?” And God said to him, “Take Me a three-year old heifer and a three-year-old she-goat and a three-year old ram and a turtledove and a young pigeon.” And he took all of these and clove through the middle, and each set his part opposite the other, but the birds he did not cleave. And carrion birds came down on the carcasses and Abram drove them off. And as the sun was about to set, a deep slumber fell upon Abram and now a great dark dread came falling upon him.” (Genesis 15:7-12)

This is the moment when Abraham learns about the future of his descendants, about their exile and affliction, but also about their ultimate return to the land in great numbers. God then moves through the pieces like a smoking oven, a flaming torch, thus establishing the first covenant with Abraham.

The word for the deep slumber that has come upon Abraham is תַרְדֵּמָה – tardema, the same word that is used when God has Adam fall into a deep sleep to create the woman from Adam’s side.

And the Lord God cast a deep slumber on the human, and he slept (…) (Genesis 2:21).

In Tanakh, in the Hebrew Bible, tardema describes more than ordinary deep slumber. In the two instances I mentioned, it refers to a divinely induced state, a vision, a trance, something super-natural. Something enigmatic and surreal – and something that results in many long lines of generations: Humanity in the case of Adam and Eve; the future Jewish people in the case of Abraham (and Sarah, though she is not present in this passage.)

But when Abraham falls into the deep slumber, there aren’t any new generations on the horizon. He and Sarah are old and childless. They left their home for a new place that is supposed to be their home but doesn’t feel like home yet. Abraham certainly is very alone in the desert landscape, under a vast sky filled with stars, talking with himself, with God. Or, through the words of Amichai’s poem: He is so alone, that he sees. He sleeps in the landscape as if held by it, by the olive trees and the hills, and he sees his future generations as well as the geographic space in which the narrative of his descendants will play out:

“To your offspring I assign this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates— (Genesis 15: 18)

To me, this passage is artistically inspiring because of its visceral mystery, and I read Amichai’s poem as a commentary on the verses in Genesis 15. I see Abraham in a visionary, trance-like deep sleep, alone, so alone, that he sees, that he becomes one with the landscape that is whispering: Sleep in me, I am holding you, I am yours. 

Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch