“They who built up the wall, and they who carried the materials, every one of them with one of his hands worked at building, and with the other hand held a weapon.”

–Nehemiah 4:17

We are living in an era beset by decadence and institutional decay, when many of the forms and practices of our society feel like they are outliving their usefulness. Their growing disrepair, and the ensuing crises of legitimacy that now plague us on many fronts, constantly confront Americans with an implicit choice between revolution and renewal.

The impulse to revolution is relatively easy to describe. It begins from the premise that our institutions were oppressive burdens to begin with, so that their degradation merely reveals the underlying truth about them and offers us the opportunity to overthrow and replace them at last. This view exhibits a mix of arrogance and ingratitude that has been a fixture of the politics of the West since the Enlightenment. It’s easy to point out its naïveté, and its long record of failure and ruin. But the power of this impulse is undeniable, and it will always exercise a pull upon some elite portion of every free society, especially among the young.

The other general category of response to the decay of core institutions is more mysterious and complicated. If our culture and traditions were not rotten from the start but have grown stale or decayed, then they require not overthrowing but revitalization. They must be made new again so that they can serve their proper purposes. But how?

Renewal doesn’t mean starting over, and it doesn’t mean standing still. It means neither overthrowing what we have nor being satisfied with the status quo. Renewal means bringing our longstanding traditions to bear on new challenges, and so reinvigorating those traditions and better meeting those challenges. It means approaching what is distinct about this moment with what is always true about this world, and so allowing our culture to be new and old at the same time, and to get the best of both.

To be devoted to renewal is to recognize that there is always a generation rising behind us that is only beginning, and that it is up to us to make sure that the world is as inviting and exciting for our successors as it has been for us. They cannot be expected to take ownership of a society that is decadent and in decline, or hopelessly nostalgic for a time they never knew. They deserve a society that is excited to welcome them and ready to offer itself to them as a source of opportunity and promise.

For this reason, the mere passage of generations is not sufficient to make renewal possible. For tradition-minded people, the fact of our natality—the fact that everyone is born into a world that already exists when we get here—is both the problem and the solution. It is the reason why renewal is needed, since without renewal the old world would strike the new generation as someone else’s home. But it is also why renewal is possible, since the world is always filling with new human beings whose needs, aspirations, and longings are the same ones that our traditional institutions have been built and adapted to serve. These new arrivals have not yet been miseducated out of their yearning to flourish, and so it is still possible to educate them in light of that yearning. The coming of the young calls our traditions back to their foundations and their purposes. And the work of renewal is therefore the work of treating our traditions as foundations for further construction, and so repairing what we have inherited and building upon it.

That means that cultural renewal is above all necessary for continuity in this dynamic world. It lets the future build on the past and make it new again, rather than breaking with the past and rejecting all we have learned.

It is important to see things this way, because the work of cultural renewal involves especially answering two kinds of threats to continuity. One is from those who oppose cultural continuity and want a sharp break from tradition, often in the name of the impulse to revolution. And the other is from the cultural decay and disintegration that always threaten to bring down what has been built up through our traditions. These are related problems, but they are distinct.

Answering the first threat requires fighting for our traditions in the public square, and defending them from people who attack them. Answering the second requires constant building and rebuilding upon the foundations of those traditions—in our own lives, in our communities, and in the larger society. Fighting and building are two very different kinds of work, but they are inexorably connected and we have to take them on together. The need to do both at once is what makes renewal so difficult.

Today’s traditionalists are most used to thinking about the first of these two challenges. It comes from people in our society who are hostile to the cause of cultural continuity for what they take to be powerful moral reasons. They think that our civilization is a patchwork of evil and greed that should be overthrown, not built upon. They are our neighbors, and they believe they are working for a moral cause. We should not forget that. But they put themselves outside of our inherited moral and cultural order and in opposition to it.

They do that because they tend to begin from different premises than traditionalists do about the nature of the human person and the good society. Rather than seeing our inherited institutions as long-evolved means of forming flawed yet dignified human beings toward moral improvement, they see those institutions as built to keep some people down for the benefit of others. They therefore look at what we have inherited and see only oppression and injustice. The purpose of their political and cultural work is to reject that inheritance and to liberate its victims. They don’t think about progress in terms of renewal, but in terms of radical transformation.

And they are very aggressive in that cause. They work to radicalize the content of our children’s education and of the cultural products that we all consume, to transform them into tools to alienate us from the society into which we have been born. They work to inject into the work of institutions like universities, the media, and major corporations an ideology of hostility to the American political tradition and to the Western religious tradition.

They are at war with precisely what we are trying to renew, and so there is no alternative to conflict. That conflict is political and cultural. Our society’s institutions are usually strong enough to prevent it from descending into actual violent conflict, and so they let us contest and struggle, persuade and defend in the public square. But there is no denying that these opponents of cultural continuity are sometimes also opponents of these very institutions of the free society—of the freedom of speech and the rule of law, of the ways by which the competition of ideas can happen safely and honestly. Our struggle for renewal therefore must be a fight to sustain these institutions. It is a fight that will be unavoidably intense.

Now some of these adversaries of cultural continuity increasingly do us the favor of clarifying that being at war with the traditions of the West means they are at war with Jews. They are anti-Semites, all too often, so the stakes of the fight should be especially clear to us American Jews.

These opponents of continuity are a radical fringe of the left. But while they are relatively few in number, they are prominent in American life, and the struggle against them clearly defines one essential facet of any project of cultural renewal in America. There is no alternative to opposing and resisting them. To think there is a path to renewal without engaging in this fight is to slip into self-delusion.

Yet at the same time, we have to remember that this facet of our challenge—fighting for renewal against those who would openly oppose it—is not all that is required. For there is another threat to cultural continuity that is at least as great, and therefore another facet of the work of renewal that matters at least as much.

This second threat involves the danger not of hostile assault from without but of decay and degradation from within. It is the danger of forgetting and being distracted from the good; the danger of losing sight of what we’re fighting for, and what we’re trying to defend. It is the danger of corruption and decadence, rooted in a variety of political, cultural, and economic idolatries that arise in every generation.

This is the bigger challenge, because it is in fact the reason why renewal is always necessary in the first place. It is simply not the case that the American way of life, or the Jewish way of life, was always on firm ground until the modern left came to attack it. Our way of life requires constant tending and renewal, now and always, because it is not what comes naturally to men and women. It is a social achievement, which demands unending effort. This is an unavoidable function of what we are as human beings.

That fact itself is an essential teaching of our highest traditions: human beings are prone to sin and vice yet we possess the capacity for righteousness and virtue. Genesis tells us that “the imagination of man is evil from his youth,” yet Genesis also tells us that men and women were created in the image of God and possess the potential to live up to that image.

This gap between what we are to begin with and what we could become means that every human person requires moral formation to reach his potential. We need to be made into something that we do not start out being. And that work of making us into human beings more fully capable of flourishing is the work of our society’s core institutions. It is the work of the family, first and foremost, and of religion, school, work, and even politics at its best.

The institutions that do this work well are vital to our society’s ability to sustain itself—to shape the rising generation to be capable of continuing its work. The work of these institutions is therefore precisely the work of renewal and continuity.

That means that the substance of the work of renewal is especially and above all educational. It is the work of formation—particularly of the young, but also of the rest of us. It is vital to continuity, and therefore also to progress, since we cannot make progress by throwing off all that has gotten us here. Hannah Arendt captured this character of education beautifully:

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.

In this sense, education is deeply constructive. It involves building upon the edifice of our civilizational traditions. It builds us, and our children, by giving us the habits of building and rebuilding: building relationships and connections, knowledge, practice, and belief, traditions and institutions. That building is made necessary by the nature of the human person and made possible by our traditions. And then in turn it makes it possible for us to sustain and renew those traditions.

This is what the culture war is all about. But it is also why fighting that war is not enough. The work of building and rebuilding our culture would always be necessary, even if we were not locked in a struggle with a hostile left. And it is necessary even though we are locked in such a struggle. Thus the two facets of the work of renewal—the fighting and the building—have to happen at the same time. There are some serious tensions between these two kinds of work, and yet somehow we have to engage in them simultaneously.

Our tradition offers us a powerful image of this kind of twofold work of renewal. The book of Nehemiah, near the close of the Hebrew Bible, is a tale of national rebirth that continues to resonate through the millennia. At its center is the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem upon their old foundations.

Nehemiah was a Jewish official in the Persian court in the 5th century BCE. As the exiled Jews returned to Zion from Persia, he was assigned to manage the work of rebuilding the city walls. And the book is his own recounting of that work, in the first person.

The work was threatened. The surrounding nations—which the book of Nehemiah, about 1,000 years before the birth of Islam, lists as “the Arabs, and the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites”—saw the return of the Jews to their historical home as a threat. So they sought to disrupt the work of rebuilding a Jewish Jerusalem.

Nehemiah understood that accomplishing this work of renewing the Jewish presence in the holy city required precisely the challenging combination of fighting and building. He tells of sending his men up to the walls to work at rebuilding with a trowel in one hand and a spear in the other. They would need to build and fight simultaneously. Their fight was a defensive fight; they were protecting themselves. But it was an assertive and offensive fight too, because they were protecting the freedom to rebuild and renew their home in a hostile environment. The task of building was, by definition, constructive. But it was also a struggle.

And it is worth considering a crucial detail that Nehemiah notes but does not stress. He didn’t create a simple division of labor between the builders and the fighters; instead, each of his men was sent to the wall with both a tool of construction and a weapon of war. Working at renewal doesn’t mean that some of us get to be fighters without needing to build and some of us get to be builders without needing to fight. Each person must do both.

This ambidextrous work of renewal is essential to the proper formation of the people involved. To fight without building can deform our soul and make us forget why we fight. It can focus us too sharply on what we oppose, what we hate and hates us, while forgetting what we affirm and what we love in the world. And yet, to see only the work of cultural construction is to forget what it requires, and to lose sight of the need to be practical, realistic, courageous, and strategic in a hostile world. To let others handle the fighting while pretending you’re too good for it yourself is to mistake cowardice for high-mindedness, and to ignore the moral and intellectual substance of the culture we are working to renew.

These two risks—the danger of becoming too hard and the danger of becoming too soft—are two sides of the same coin. They both involve moral deformation that can result from ignoring the real character of our situation. To address them both requires us to be truly well-rounded, at once cold-eyed and warm-hearted, intellectual and practical, courageous and sagacious.

Is that combination really possible? Here I think there are some contemporary reasons for confidence, both in Jewish culture and in American culture.

One model is the example of modern Israel. The ethos I’m describing, the ethos of the fighting scholar and the thinker with dirt under his fingernails, is very much the ethos of Israel. It is the notion that everybody fights, and everybody works, and everybody reads, and everybody thinks.

The early Zionists who embraced that ethos understood themselves to be offering it up as a hard-headed alternative to the stereotypical soft and insulated traditional Jewish scholar. Perhaps unwittingly, they were gesturing toward precisely the model of Nehemiah. They were thoroughly Jewish, as modern Israel increasingly demonstrates. And they were wholeheartedly engaged in a project of Jewish renewal—of a return to the holy city. They were rebuilding the walls on their old foundations, sometimes literally with a trowel in one hand and a rifle in the other. Israel continues to engage in that work now.

The American situation is, thankfully, less existentially dire and precarious than that. Our lives are not on the line, most of the time. But the work of renewal surely is. And here, too, if less literally, effective models of renewal are often examples of simultaneously fighting and building.

One example is evident in higher education. In Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, and other states, legislators have empowered tradition-minded academics to launch new schools of civic thought within large public universities. That work is only beginning, but it already offers examples of the reconstruction of some genuinely academic spaces within an otherwise hostile university. The people involved are rebuilding walls on old foundations while fighting for the space to teach and learn. We can see much the same in the classical-schools movement, and in a variety of cultural and educational enterprises that focus on the highest kinds of intellectual aspirations while also engaging effectively in the practical political and bureaucratic work of beating back hostile opposition.

Neither end of this work can be neglected. Neither the building nor the fighting, neither the cultural nor the political, can succeed without the other. They must always be allowed to shape each other. Some people are of course more suited to one than to the other, and should invest their energies accordingly. And yet to be genuinely serious and effective, these must only be differences of emphasis. None of us can wholly neglect either facet of the work.

This means we must not seek ephemeral political victory at the expense of the enduring moral substance of what we need to teach our children. We only undermine our most important goals when we glorify contemptible and unworthy leaders, abandon essential moral norms, or assault the very rule of law that makes it possible for us to live as free people—even if doing so promises some tactical benefit in the near term. To fight with no conception of the good is to destroy ourselves.

But it also means we cannot engage in intellectual and cultural construction at the expense of an honest and clear-eyed understanding of the nature of the human person and the realities of an often-hostile world. We shouldn’t imagine that isolating ourselves will keep us safe, or that we can avoid the fight for the culture by pretending there is no disagreement. Whistling can be lovely, but whistling past graveyards can be a dangerous failure of responsibility.

To avoid both risks, we have to grasp that politics isn’t everything, and that there must be standards that guide and constrain even what we will do for the sake of winning. At the same time we have to grasp that there is no avoiding politics, and that sometimes you can only win by making sure your adversary loses good and hard.

This is difficult work, because it means that we limit ourselves in both facets of renewal. Holding a trowel in one hand and a spear in the other means that we both fight and build with just one hand. But it also means that we never forget why we are fighting or why we are building.

This combination, this dual conception of our communal and national situation, is actually the substance of what we are working to renew—of what we have to teach our children so that they don’t become too hard or too soft, and so that they can build on the foundations they’re inheriting. It is the only answer to the decadence and decay that now confront us in so many arenas of American life. The future requires the renewal of our highest traditions. It requires that we grasp that our society is worth fighting for, and worth building up.

This essay has been adapted from a speech given on December 8, 2024 at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York.