I’ll be honest with you. I haven’t spent much time in the book of Nehemiah. It’s one of those corners of the Hebrew Bible I know I should visit more often but somehow never do. Then yesterday, I was watching an interview on Fox News with Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, and she said something that stopped me cold. Speaking about the relentless conspiracy theories and attacks against her family and team, she invoked the prophet: “It reminds me so much of chapter six in the book of Nehemiah. He is building a wall, and the townspeople are at the base of that hill saying, Nehemiah, calling him all these names, saying all these things, come on down. Every single time, he had the same message four times in a row: I cannot come down. I am busy building.”
What an incredibly powerful coping strategy. And I thought: here is a grieving widow, under siege from every direction, and she reaches for an ancient Jewish text to steady herself. She doesn’t lash out. She doesn’t spiral. She simply refuses to come down from the wall.
So what exactly happened in Nehemiah chapter six, and why does it speak so directly to our moment?
Nehemiah was a Jew living in Persian exile who received permission from King Artaxerxes to return to Jerusalem and rebuild its shattered walls. The city had been destroyed, its defenses in ruins, and Nehemiah took on the holy work of restoration. But not everyone wanted to see Jerusalem rebuilt. Sanballat the Horonite and his allies saw a fortified Jerusalem as a threat to their regional power, and they deployed every weapon in their arsenal to stop the construction: mockery, threats, false accusations, and most insidiously, repeated invitations to “come down and talk.”
Four times they sent messengers demanding a meeting. Four times Nehemiah gave the same answer:
Notice what Nehemiah doesn’t do. He doesn’t defend himself against their slander. He doesn’t engage with their accusations. He doesn’t try to win the argument or prove them wrong. He simply states the fact: I am doing something important, and I will not abandon it to wrestle with you in the mud.
Modern psychology has a term for this: cognitive defusion. Developed within Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, cognitive defusion is the practice of creating space between yourself and your thoughts, particularly the intrusive, negative, anxiety-producing thoughts that demand your attention. The goal isn’t to suppress the thoughts or pretend they don’t exist. The goal is to observe them without becoming entangled in them. You acknowledge the noise without climbing down from your wall to address it.
Nehemiah understood this three thousand years before therapists gave it a name. His enemies wanted him reactive. They wanted him defensive. They wanted him so consumed with answering their attacks that he would abandon his sacred work. And he simply… didn’t. He kept laying stones.
Living in Israel today, I find this teaching unbearably relevant. The noise directed at the Jewish people, and at the State of Israel specifically, is relentless. Social media feeds overflow with accusations, distortions, and outright lies. International bodies issue condemnation after condemnation. University campuses erupt with hatred dressed up as justice. And the temptation, oh, the temptation, is to come down from the wall. To spend every waking hour defending, explaining, correcting, fighting.
But look at what we are building.
We are building a nation that has absorbed millions of refugees and turned a desert into farmland. We are building hospitals that treat anyone who walks through their doors, regardless of religion or nationality. We are building technology that feeds the world, heals the sick, and makes the impossible possible. We are building an alliance between Jews and Christians that would have seemed unthinkable to our grandparents, an alliance built on shared love for the Bible, shared values, and shared hope.
Erika Kirk got it exactly right. Sanballat and his friends are still at the base of the wall, shouting, mocking, demanding we come down. And the answer remains the same as it was in Nehemiah’s day: Melakha gedolah ani oseh, I am doing a great work. V’lo uchal laredet, I cannot come down.
This doesn’t mean we ignore threats or fail to defend ourselves when defense is necessary. Nehemiah posted guards on the wall. He armed his workers. He took security seriously. But he never let the enemy dictate his priorities. The building continued.
So the next time the noise becomes deafening, and it will, remember the man on the wall. Remember the widow who invoked his name. Remember that every moment spent wrestling in the mud with people who want to see you fail is a moment stolen from the sacred work of building. Your wall is waiting. Your stones are ready. And the only answer worth giving to those who demand you abandon your post is the one Nehemiah gave four times over:
I cannot come down. I am busy building.
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