NEHEMIAH 4: DEALING WITH ENEMIES -- PART ONE

 

In Neh. 1:10 and 2:19 we were introduced to several enemies of the Jews who are not at all happy about attempts to rebuilt the fortifications around the city, and so they begin to make fun of the pathetic efforts that are being made. In chapter 4 these enemies take the center stage.

Nehemiah 4:1-1-3 The Samaritan and Ammonite enemies begin to mock the Israelites in an attempt to demoralize them. But Nehemiah turns their insults into a rallying cry for the people to work with renewed effort. This sort of thing sometimes happened to us when those in our business centers or production plants began to act as if they were superior to those of us in R&D. One repeated comment to us was that whereas they were involved in actually making money for the company, we represented company overhead as a drain on the bottom line. It got to be a bit annoying at times, but we knew deep down that without our generation of new products to sell and our plant and customer technical services, the company could really not survive long without us. In the same way, Nehemiah tells the people to ignore the taunts and remember that they are doing God's work.

By the way, there is one taunt recorded in v. 3 that may have a bit of truth in it. Tobiah says, “That stone wall they are building – any fox going up on it would cause it to tumble!” In fact, archeologists who have excavated remains of the early Jerusalem wall have noted that the stones for some of the upper portions are laid in a very random pattern compared to the much more precisely laid original wall.

This illustrates another general principle usually expressed as “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”I prefer to state it in a form that I guarantee you will never find in any business manual: “Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well.”

Let me back up a bit at this point to explain myself because I know that I can be accused of contradicting an earlier statement I made in a post on Nehemiah 1-2. There I noted the example of George Washington Carver who always tried to do the best he possibly could even when carrying out the most menial job. But while I would certainly not counsel doing just enough to get by at your job, it is possible at times to go too far in the opposite direction. At the first laboratory I worked, I noted that there was one rather elderly bench chemist there who did not have a very high laboratory title. I found that he was a very meticulous worker who had never made any real contributions to the company in his many years of working there. (You might ask at this point why he hadn't been let go decades earlier, but that is another management failure that is too far off the subject to discuss.) The problem stemmed from the fact that he was a perfectionist who was constantly redoing his experiments because the equipment might have not been washed enough, was washed with too much soap, his technician had stirred the reaction mixture clockwise instead of counterclockwise, etc.,etc.

Unfortunately, I had one such employee later on in my own department. He wasn't a bad chemist, but after one of his projects was completed, I kept having to bug him to write up his results in what we called Formal Research Reports. Our secretary informed me that she had already typed up his whole report months earlier, and she had it all ready except for the appendix. I should explain that never in my experience had anyone ever even looked at a research report after it was catalogued and put away for safe keeping somewhere or other, and certainly no one had ever had the need to pore through any of the tables of data found in an appendix. Our secretary then told me that even the appendix had been completed and typed up a long time earlier, but that the chemist had taken it back from her once he looked through the whole report.

I confronted the chemist and asked him to return the appendix to the secretary immediately so that he could go on to the next important assignment that was waiting for him. He explained that he couldn't do that because he realized that the font in the tables in the appendix didn't match that in the body of the report. But, he explained, he was going to correct the situation because he had been spending the last month or two trying to write a computer program to automatically change the font to the correct one (you can guess that this was in the very primitive days of computers). Our secretary told me that he had been informed that she could re-type the whole thing to his satisfaction in one day but he had refused. I saw that he was transferred to a desk job, and when the next lay-offs were announced, he was one of the first to be let go.

Getting back to Nehemiah and his situation, in the first place the volunteers who rebuilt the walls were by no means stonemasons. But more pertinently, the immediate task at hand was to secure the walls against outside attack, not to win the Architecture Digest annual award for the neatest fortifications.And this was becoming increasingly more important each day as the vultures began to circle.

Speaking of vultures, it is time to get back to what Israel's enemies were up to next since mere mockery was not enough to stop the work from proceeding. The next probable move on their part was to actually attack the walls before they could be strengthened any further. To guard against that eventuality, Nehemiah has armed guards stationed around the city. The only somewhat oblique parallel in my own work experience is to point out that our major role within the company was to ensure its long-term viability by coming up with improved products and manufacturing processes so that we could compete with anything new that our competition might develop. This is something that every business group, large or small, has to factor into their business plans if they want to survive into the future.

Verse 19 is an interesting one to ponder. Nehemiah notes that the various work teams with their armed guards are widely separated from one another. Thus, he tells them that if any are attacked, they should immediately sound a trumpet and the others will rush over to aid them repel the enemy. Most companies are divided into different departments or silos, and often they feel that their particular entity is the only one that counts. But upper management must constantly look for ways to cross-fertilize the resources of all the departments and get them to cooperate rather than compete with one another. Helping them to realize that they all have a common enemy outside the company is one way to accomplish that.