What is self esteem?

Self esteem is if you believe you are esteemed.

“Ha-addam who midini” – we are social creatures; as such, like a baby needs a bottle, like a child needs love, we need to believe we are esteemed by our society.

Healthy self esteem is a self-image, that, people hold you in high esteem.

However, we must be very careful to differentiate between ga-aveh and self esteem.

Self-esteem means you feel valued by your society.

Ga-aveh means you feel more valuable than you society!

And here is the very great irony, for bad self-esteem leads to ga-aveh.

The Friedikeh Rebbe explains this clearly in his moshel (example) that just like its an unhealthy sign to feel your hand, for the healthy hand doesn’t trigger any feelings of itself in the brain (where, say the hand stuck in a door, shoots strong impulses of pain, in order for you to rectify the situation) similarly, the healthy person, does not think about himself.

So when our self-esteem gets bullied – and this is the cause of bullying, which is the same phenomena of antisemitism – namely, that one person with an unhealthy self-esteem gets jealous of another’s healthy self-esteem, and this jealousy causes the person (AKA heichaltzu) to seek all kinds of rationalizations, justifying abuse, which in fact is a mechanism to lower the person whom they are jealous of self-esteem.

Ga-aveeh is when we are obsessed with our own self.

So ironically, low self-esteem, triggers a desire to compensate which triggers delusions of grandeur (this is also called Narcissistic Personality Disorder which is a well-researched psychological phenomena.)

The bottom line is, we must know we are a Chellek Eloikah Mimal Mamesh, in fact our self-esteem need not come from our society, it can come from the very fact that Hashem chose us from every nation to be a light, to humble our ego (for as the Baal Shem Tov said, even if we don’t have a obsession with self, ga-aveh, we all have a latent (hidden) ga-aveh, and all the Mitzvos are there to help litzaref (reduce) our ga-aveh; which is why we said “Na-aseh Venishmah” (for a person feels ga-aveh from what they understand, not from what they don’t!))