Комментарий к Берешит 2:21

מצלעותיו OF HIS RIBS — The word means of his sides, similar to (Exodus 26:20) ולצלע המשכן “and for the second side of the tabernacle”; this has a bearing upon what they (the Sages) say, (Eruvin 18a): They were created with two faces (sides).

ויפל, the word תרדמה describes a sleep far deeper than ordinary sleep every night,שינה , and שינה itself is a deeper sleep than תנומה. The reason why G’d made Adam fall into such a deep sleep was to ensure that he would not feel the surgery being performed on his body. Although, if G’d had wanted to, He could have performed painless surgery while Adam was awake and watching the proceedings, we must always remember that G’d does not perform miracles unless they are absolutely necessary. When there is a solution to a problem within the parameters of well known laws of nature, G’d makes use of them. Putting Adam into a deep sleep known as תרדמה was not something miraculous, seeing that such deep sleep does occur quite frequently in some people’s lives.
Our sages (Sanhedrin 39) state (surmise) that if G’d had removed this part of Adam’s body (skeleton) from him while he had been aware of it, he might subsequently have detested Chavah, remembering how she looked before she was fit to be presented to him. [The Talmud there illustrates the manner in which Rabban Gamliel’s daughter explained to the Roman Emperor who had claimed that G’d had stolen a rib from Adam, why it had been necessary to do this in a clandestine fashion. She invited the Emperor to watch her prepare a piece of raw meat and to observe every step before this piece of meat was fit to be served on the table. Having watched this, the Emperor lost his craving for the meat in question. Rabban Gamliel’s daughter told the Emperor to imagine what Adam would have felt like if he had had to watch how his mate was produced step by step. Ed.] Not having watched any part of the process, but being presented with a beautiful female all of a sudden, Adam was bound to be overjoyed and grateful to G’d not only for having taken care of his problem, but for the manner in which G’d had taken care of it. He realised, of course, that men in the future would not have their wives “manufactured” in the same way. We already explained on verse 18 why the other females of the species were not literally created through removing part of the male’s body and building it up with externally secured tissue made from earth. Having described Adam as in a state of תרדמה, the kind of sleep induced by an anesthesia, why did the Torah add the words ויישן, “he slept?” The Torah wanted us to know that the deep sleep lasted only until the operation had been performed and the wound had been closed up. After that Adam only slept the kind of sleep which is a form of quiet relaxation. It is possible that the sleep referred to in our verse as ויישן, was actually Adam’s first experience of sleep since he had been created. We must not forget that all the details we heard about man occurred in the second half of the sixth “day” of creation. This day was so full of activities that it did not end until the children Kayin and Hevel had been born (Sanhedrin 38).

ויסגר בשר תחתנה, “He filled in flesh in its place.” With reference to the letter ס in the word ויסגר, Bereshit Rabbah 17,6 writes that as soon as Chavah was created Satan was created alongside her. We did not find the letter ס which symbolises Satan [the סיטרא אחרא, “the spiritually negative section of the emanations in kabbalistic language, Ed.] until we came to this word in the Torah. If you were to point out that the letter ס already appeared in 2,13 where the Torah speaks of the rivers flowing around the whole land of Cush, סובב את כל הארץ כוש, the letter was used there only in connection with the rivers, not in connection with the creation of either man or woman and their fates.