t'cholel'chem -- חָלַל

can relate to writhing in pain, perhaps in birthing -- sometimes translated as "travail" in this context; to dancing or circling; to being hollow, being hollowed out, or emerging from a hollow

Avivah Zornberg links this expression to the hollowness and cry of the shofar ("Cries and Whispers" in Beginning Anew, Simon & Schuster 1997; available as audio lecture).

Gedola teshuva, shemevia refua laolam: Great is repentance which brings healing to the world [Yoma 86a]...The world has become sick, it needs repair, it needs healing. Perhaps inevitably in the course of a year, things really go out of sorts, the truly tuned instrument begins to go off, and we need, on Rosh Hashana, to retune. Something like that seem to be implied here.

[Zornberg, cont.]

This is universal, and the beginning of my subject proper. In the work of Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions, for instance, this is a very important theme. He points to society after society that celebrates either the New Year or a coronation. In all these societies the purpose of these rituals, of crowning a king or beginning a year, is basically to heal the world. The world has begun to crack, to shake; it's not so solid anymore. And every now and then we get together and try to make the world sit firmly again, take its place firmly in time and in space....Among the Yurok tribes in California the priest will climb to the top of a hill and drag a stick across the ground, across the dust, and say, "Now the cracks are filled up." Whatever cracks there had been in the world are now filled up. There's a healing, some kind of refua, here. Or he sits firmly on a stone and says: "Now the world will stop tipping." It's been tipping, it has gotten out of balance; and now I sit down and it's firmly in place again. These are all, in Eliade's terms, cosmogonic rituals. They reactivate the creative force of beginnings because the world needs tikkun (repair).

[Zornberg, cont.]

If I assume that something about that procedure, of trying to clock in to beginnings by way of putting the world right, is relevant to our traditions, where do we see it? What do we do that re-creates beginnings? In an obvious way, we don't have any such rituals. What I want to suggest (with all due modesty, because I don't know if I'm right in this) is that we look at a surprising source. In Isaiah 51:1-2 we read: Shimu eilai rodfei tzedek mevakshet Hashem: Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness, who seek God. Habitu el tzur chutzavtem ve'el makkevet bor nukartem: Look to the rock from which you were hewn, the origin, and to the hole, the cavity, the cistern from which you were hewn out.

...

[Zornberg, cont.]

It's an extraordinary word, that techolelkhem. It's in the future tense, te. The root of the verb is lecholel, which means "T bring to birth." It means to go through birth pangs, pains of all kinds...It also conveys the idea of hollowness: a chalal is a hollow, an empty space. That's the cave, the hole that you are to look to. And it is identified with Sarah....

-- p.178-179

[Long discussion of midrash about Sarah learning of the Akeda, the binding and near death of Isaac. Zornberg explores the idea that Sarah's death is NOT a result of something simple: NOT shock and grief on learning of the situation and hearing from Satan that Isaac died; NOT shock and relief at finding out he survived, but something more of a more complex theological and existential nature about the fragility of life.

[Also discussion of yelala, hollowness for breath and crying, and yelala as the place where Torah is given. -- see page 195ff]

[Zornberg, cont.]

In this perspective, what does it mean to say that Sarah is the one who will generate us? Why is Sarah the one? Perhaps we haven't yet succeeded in retroactively justifying her life. In what sense could we justify the way she dies, a death that apparently gives a terrible inner architecture to her whole life, a shape that no one would choose? What good is she doing her children through this? It's hard to say glibly. But the point I'm trying to make is that she, for all time, made it clear that there are holes and cavities, and that one shouldn't fool oneself about it. The act of faith, the life of faith, of affirmation and value, acts that really are acts, arise out of what Sarah left, what Sarah bequeathed unresolved. We will try to resolve it, but here we experience a moment that is unabated in any way, not equivocal, which we then must deal with. In dealing with it, we become who we're supposed to be. That's techolelkhem. Through much pain, she will give birth to you. She invents longing. She invents the sense of a negative, a sense of yelala.

-- p. 197, Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, "Cries and Whispers," 1997

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As it says (Genesis 20:1), "And Abraham journeyed from there." This is what the scripture means (Job 14:18), "But a falling mountain will wear away, and a rock will be removed from its place." The falling mountain that will wear away is Sodom and its environs. And the rock that will be removed from its place is Abraham. And there is no rock but Abraham, as it says (Isaiah 51:1), "Look to the rock from which you were hewn." Immediately (Genesis 20:1), "And Abraham journeyed from there."

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