To sit, to dwell, to inhabit

by Amanda Mbuvi

In sukkot shall you yashav (ישב) for seven days (Lev. 23:42)

Yashav (ישב): to sit, to dwell, to inhabit

There are a lot of resonances between Sukkot and Covid—the emphasis on being outside, the way the box of the sukkah echoes the boxes of a Zoom screen and calls us out of isolation, and the way exposure to the elements and prayers for rain highlight the vulnerability at the core of our existence. And there’s another resonance in an aspect of the holiday that I didn’t notice until I sat with it.

As a taste of transience specifically enjoined upon citizens, the sukkah collapses the distinction between the journey and its completion. The shelter of people on the move, the sukkah signifies passage from the narrow place of enslavement in Mitzrayim to the promised land. At the same time, the verb for occupying the sukkah—yashav—also represents the opposite of movement. Along with “to inhabit,” yashav also means “to sit” or “to dwell,” a reminder that the journey to the promised land was prolonged by forty years of wandering in the wilderness.

In the sukkah, we inhabit these two realities at once—that God moved us and that God held us in place. That combination also characterizes my journey through long Covid into disability.  

To sit, to dwell, to inhabit

In my mind, I’m still the college athlete I was decades ago, when being sick meant running only a few miles. But Covid took me to a place where even watching tv required time to rest and recover. And I could only watch the same show—watching different things was somehow too much. 

To sit. And then to lie down to recover from the sitting.

What I had was not a disease with awareness ribbons and 5K races. It was something in the realm of the ordinary. Most people had already had Covid, and they had a sense of what that meant that was so different from what I was experiencing. They expected me to be capable of things that I wasn’t, and I could hardly think clearly enough to explain it to them. I tried to do what was expected of me and I became more sick. At a certain point it began to feel inappropriate to continue to be so sick—like taking up too much space. 

I associate the transition from being sick with Covid to having the disability of long Covid with the shift to learning to adapt to the new condition of my body instead of just focusing on when it would be over. I learned to understand and measure cognitive exertion the way I’d previously learned to understand and measure physical exertion. Following Spoon Theory, I learned to budget my energy instead of entering each day already committed to doing as much as I could handle. That gave me the wherewithal to cope when the unexpected happened so things like a sudden rain while I was driving didn’t push me over the edge. It turned out that living better didn’t depend on getting better. Adapting to my new limitations made them less limiting. When I focused on being the person I was instead of the person that others expected, the person I thought I was supposed to be—then, I became stronger.   

To dwell and not conform to the expectation of recovery.

Inhabit

Amidst this experience, the specter of laziness intensified around me. It had been a persistent haunting in my life no matter how much evidence to the contrary piled up.  In high school I won the award for being the hardest worker on the cross country team (our sport is your sport’s punishment), epitomized by the time I more or less blacked out during a race and continued to run the last half mile to the finish line. I know how to push through when the going gets tough, maybe too well. That I’ve chosen natural childbirth shows that I am not someone who rushes to medical intervention.

Still, doctors have treated me like I was not worthy of care. Like the time when, after watching me struggle for days, my husband insisted that I was dealing with something serious and needed to see the doctor, and when I went to the after-hours clinic the doctor scolded me for coming and said I wasn’t that sick. Or the time when we went to the doctor because of blood in my baby’s diaper. Once the pediatrician determined that the blood was mine, he said it was not his problem and sent me away with only the suggestion that I try adopting the most inconvenient diet possible (he literally told me to figure out what I ate the most and stop eating that). I went back to the midwives at the birth center, and they figured out that the blood (and the excruciating pain of nursing) were because of an issue with the baby that had nothing to do with my diet.

I have a lot of these stories of being demeaned and dismissed. Until I saw the episode of Last Week Tonight, I had no idea this kind of thing was a racialized experience. I thought it was me. I tried to be better.  

Here, I feel like I should trot out sources attesting to things like the percentage of medical professionals who (erroneously!) believe that Black people feel less pain, as though speaking the truth of my experience required that kind of validation to be legitimate and to prove that I was not just making excuses for my own weakness.

Researching the use of heart rate to calibrate exercise helped me begin to recognize what I had internalized. I discovered that my conception of the appropriate degree of exertion was wildly inaccurate. I was pushing myself way too hard while also assuming that my effort was pitifully inadequate. I had believed people who told me I needed to get tougher and dig deeper, privileged their words over the testimony of my own body to the point that I no longer knew how to heed its cues.

This is what it’s like to inhabit the meaning given to Black womanhood in this society where our presence developed from slavery, which constructed us as constitutionally in need of discipline and interpreted our resistance to enslavement as evidence of a lazy and deceitful nature—perceptions that have persisted. Through Covid, I entered a double bind between the expectations that I would quickly get healthier and that, when performing the roles of mother, worker, and even sick person, hovering on the brink of collapse was the only indication that I was doing enough. It’s like living in a witch trial where survival indicates guilt and vindication comes only through being destroyed.

In Sukkot

My teacher describes going to see the Prince of Egypt movie and being confused when the credits started rolling and people began to leave. How could the story be complete without the construction of the Tabernacle?

Only when my body could no longer perform my culture’s demand for constant motion did I really start to recognize how we edit the exodus story to reflect that sensibility. I was aware of the construction of the Tabernacle and the forty years of wandering in the wilderness, but I hadn’t taken them seriously as part of the story and the identity that derives from it. I lived with the truncated version that went from enslavement in Egypt to Sinai to the promised land.

Sukkot, however, highlights what I had skipped over. It commemorates the journey, inviting us to dwell in its liminal spaces and rejoice in them.

Amanda Mbuvi is a scholar and teacher with expertise in Tanakh, ethics, and multifaith studies. She has a special interest in the way stories shape our sense of being part of something larger than ourselves and can help us envision, embody, and bring forth new possibilities for the world. Her first book is Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Politics of Identity Formation.