The Secret to True Self-Esteem

My son just returned from a trip to Iceland with one of his best friends.

While he was there, he hiked all over, took in the nightlife in the capital city – it never really got dark, so it wasn’t technically nightlife – and he sent us pictures with captions like “most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen.” 

When he got back, we schmoozed about the trip and he told us that when he and his friend were sitting in a restaurant, they looked around and had the following perception:

That they were the shortest, most plain-looking people in the restaurant.  Apparently the restaurant they were in drew a lot of native Icelanders.  According to my son, they were all well above 6 feet tall and looked like models for Nordic track. 

Whether or not he realized it at the time, he created an interesting modern version of the Torah’s story of the twelve scouts, which we read this morning.

The essential story is similar:  The land is beautiful beyond belief.  We, however, are inadequate.  The people are larger, stronger, nobler than we are.

My son and his friend felt this in a humorous way and I don’t think he was reflecting a deep sense of inadequacy.

But our ancestors who scouted out the land felt their inadequacy profoundly.  To be fair, they were not on a post-college jaunt.  They knew that they had to conquer this land, not just visit and take pictures, that their lives would be on the line.

After considering my son’s story and the ancient story, it occurred to me that they present an opportunity to reflect on the notion of self-esteem.

How do we regard ourselves in absolute terms and in relation to other people? 

You often hear people say that they want their children to have healthy self-esteem.

What does that mean?  When do you cross the border between healthy self-esteem and arrogance?  Can healthy self-esteem be cultivated or is it something you either have or you don’t?

The Torah’s story yields some interesting insights into the notion of self-esteem and I’d like to share a few that occurred to me.

As part of their description of their surroundings, the scouts describe the inhabitants of the land as אנשי מדות anshei midot, which the Jewish Publication Society translates as “men of great size.” 

And then, in a description that’s often quoted and very psychologically telling, ונהי כחגבים בעינינו וכן היינו בעיניהם vanehee be’einenu kechagavim v’chen hayiynu be’einehem.

Again – JPS translation:  We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves and so we must have looked to them.

First insight:  Self-esteem often isn’t rational.  It generally isn’t based on rational analysis and it generally leads us to do non-rational things, like imagine that whatever view we have of ourselves, that’s the view others have.  If we feel small, we imagine others see us that way as well.   Of course we know that over time, the vibe we give off can affect how others perceive us.  But all of this tends to be subjective, often based more on our fear than on anything else.

The second and third insights I would share have to do with what can, ultimately, be the source of appropriate, healthy self-esteem. 

Joshua and Caleb say to the people, אם חפץ בנו ה׳im chafetz banu adonai – if God is pleased with us, He will bring us into the land. 

The people should have confidence, they imply, not because of their own gifts or stature but because of God’s support.

Understood in a certain way, we can apply this to ourselves regardless of what we may think about God and how God helps us or doesn’t help us. 

The second insight we can learn about self-esteem, I believe, is that it doesn’t primarily have to be about ourselves.  It can come from a sense that we’re not “in the world” alone, that we’re part of something larger, that we derive strength from a higher power, however we might understand that, and from the people the people around us.

Of course, this can be corrupted.  We can grow to believe that we have God in our back pockets because we’re so righteous, or that our group is superior.  Like anything else, an insight helps most if we are careful in how we internalize it.

To 7^th graders walking into the lunchroom and figuring out where to sit, to summer interns working on a project, to a family who moves into a new community, to any one of us waking up in the morning and doing the self-talk – “am I ok?  Will I be able to do what I need to do?”

The Torah as I’m interpreting it can help us to consider that self-esteem is not just about my-self, it’s about the support we give to others and receive from others. 

And now the third insight.  The Israelites were part of a mission to enter the land and to establish a society based on certain principles.

Profound self-esteem, the Torah seems to suggest to us, is not about how tall or smart or affluent or beautiful we are.  It’s about what our goals are, what our mission is.  We can certainly question the mission of our ancestors, we can wonder why they needed to defeat people in order to enter the land, we can identify elements of their mission that we would want to emulate and other elements that we would rather not.

But the potential insight for us, I believe, is enormously useful, and that is, we feel confident and comfortable to the extent that we are doing something valuable in the world.

A few years ago, I spoke about how we sometimes over-value the superficial and I mentioned a blog where a number of people, mostly young men, were writing disparaging remarks about their sense of the physical appearance of Elena Kagan, just after she was nominated to sit on the Supreme Court.

Never mind that she attended Princeton and Oxford, got her law degree at Harvard and served as the Dean of Harvard Law School.

Now I hope that Elena Kagan has good self-esteem despite what these young men wrote, if she read it at all.  But I’m going to go a step further than you might think I would.  I would hope that she would have good self-esteem even if she didn’t have her academic credentials and she weren’t sitting on the Supreme Court, provided she was doing something valuable with her life.

There are so many ways that self-esteem can go awry.  We suffer from lack of self-confidence, we put ourselves down, we imagine that others are looking down on us as well. 

Intentionally or not, 12 scouts with two differing approaches, a tired leader, a frustrated God and a nervous populace are calling to us across the generations, teaching us a few things about self-esteem, about how we might conduct ourselves with appropriate confidence in the world.

They are teaching us that how we view ourselves, and how we imagine others view us, is non-rational.

They are teaching us that self-esteem is not just about self, but about how we feel supported, by God, or by others, or by all of the above.

And they are teaching us that genuine self-esteem emerges when we are doing something valuable in the world. 

These are hard lessons to learn, whether we surrounded by “beautiful people” in a restaurant or embarking on a new challenge or just facing a new day.

Once again, in its quirky way, the Torah teaches us how to live.

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on June 13, 2015