הערכה עצמית,ד''ר יגאל גודמן,נושא נפש האדם למיזם

shalom my name is dr craig goodman i'm a clinical psychologist and a neuroscientist i'm here today with a brute to talk about the connections between psychology and torah now these two worlds are not normally grouped together or connected within the two disciplines but there are absolutely connections within the two and they actually exist in complete harmony you can bring and draw a lot of uh bridges and sources from modern psychology from the torah itself in fact the torah is in my opinion entirely psychology but what is psychology it's it's the understanding of human beings of what we

think what we feel now today's lecture is about self-esteem and being a human being now first of all we have to define what is self-esteem and what is a human being now let's start with the human being since everybody is that we hope now a human being in hebrew is called a ben adam then his son adam is man or human and ben meaning son of man so we are all sons and daughters of the first man and woman adam and eve in the garden of eden now everybody is called by that name okay everybody is named banaya dam the sons and daughters of adam richard the first man and the first woman now they

received one mitzvah one mitzvah don't eat from the tree of knowledge now today i mean uh jews who are practicing have 613 mitzvot or we say taryag mitzvot now there's a big difference between one and six hundred and thirteen i mean if you think about it one mitzvah that's not too difficult and adam and eve they had the best of everything i mean the garden of eden it was the perfect weather the perfect environment they had all the food in the world there was no disease there was no sickness there was no death nothing everything was perfect you just had to keep this one mitzvah don't eat from

the tree of knowledge and you ask most people how long were adam and eve in the garden of eden before they finally i mean blew it and ate from the tree of knowledge how long do you think it was well there are different sources but according to the midrash midrash rabbah in breshit it says that from the time that adam and eve were created to the time that they ate from the tree of knowledge elapsed exactly seven hours seven hours there's even a disagreement in the midrash that says it's three hours let's be let's be generous and give them seven it's not even half a day and they already sinned

how much more so for us and we're all built in their image we're all created from the original mold from the original first two people so we have the same ability we have the same uh tendency to fail to make mistakes to to to blow it okay now what happened if you read the shot if you read the kumash okay the the five books of moses in the first chap in the first chapter in the first book of moses brace sheet or genesis it tells the story and bats him according to this story god calls out and says where are you where are you guys now why does he call him out but god really doesn't know hashem

doesn't know where they are of course he knows where they are he created yes he created everything you know he created the whole world he knows where they are why does he have to call him it's almost like when a parent hears their kids messing around or doing something or fighting instead of going and catching them red-handed and balling them out and then criticizing them or punishing them they give them the opportunity to come forward come forth so they call them and say what are you guys doing back there what's going on back there allowing them to come because when somebody i mean we know

when when someone uh you know god forbid when someone does a crime uh the judicial system goes much lighter on that person if they come forward and they admit what they did they don't try to run from the truth or or lie about it or or not get caught so this is the purpose in my opinion that hashem called wanted to let them come forward to not make them feel afraid of him and when they came when he approached them he said to him said to adam what'd you do i'm i didn't do anything eve did it she she gave me the uh the the tree the fruit from the tree of knowledge and then yesterday yes steve

what did you do i told you guys not to eat from the tree or not i didn't do it the snake did it everybody threw it on the other guard you know past the book as they say didn't take responsibility for what they did now here is a big as we say in hebrew here's a big thing that i have to tell you today according to a lot of sources several sources they say that if adam and eve at that very moment god placed hashem placed in us the the positive and the evil inclination the good inclination the evil inclination he put the snake there in the garden of eden he knew there would be temptation it was

like we were being set up for a fall in a way there was no question that we were going to fail eventually we were going to fail but what was the big new thing here was that if at that very moment hashem said to him what did you do why did you eat from the tree of knowledge and we would have said you know what i'm so sorry i'm i i beg for forgiveness i want to do chuva i want to i want to repent you're right you gave us just one mitzvah and we we blew it we really we made a big mistake we didn't believe in you we didn't listen to what you said we're so sorry if adam and eve would have taken

responsibility for their actions if they would have been willing to admit to it and ask forgiveness we would have been forgiven and we would have stayed in the garden of eden we wouldn't have gotten kicked out we wouldn't have been thrown out everything would have been different there'd be no disease there'd be no death no suffering so all along throughout our history if you look at it we've had this long kind of or a lot of accounts from our forefathers and four mothers abraham isaac and jacob moshe bainu moses all the great personalities or torah personalities in the tanakh in all the torah

literature there are over and over again incidents in instances where they have made big mistakes i mean look at moshe banu moses he didn't even get to go into the promised land because he had gotten angry in front of all the kahal israel he got angry in front of everybody lost his school for that he was punished if anybody else would have done it they wouldn't have gotten such a big punishment but he had a responsibility to to represent hashem to be a leader to in to instill confidence and and and and security in the people of israel and when he got angry and he lost his patience or he

didn't have enough belief that was a big a big sin because he was responsible he's a person of status and it really affected everyone else now this is just one of many examples over and over we fail but which one of these personalities really got it right really did the entire you know went from one end of the spectrum to the other and made a complete turnaround it was yoda yuda and the story of tamar now most of you i hope know the story of it you can read in um in the uh sephiroth sheet in the book of genesis about yudah yudah had three sons and tamar married one of them and he didn't act

appropriately he died he married her to the other son because this is a mitzvah if you're the the wife of your brother uh if your brother passes away it's a mitzvah for the other brother to marry that wife so then he died now yuda was was afraid that maybe she's got something wrong with her or some side a curse or something and if he marries the third son he's going to die too but he promised her i will marry i will let you marry my third son when he's old enough and the years passed by and nothing happened he didn't keep his word and so tamar dressed up and you know we know the story she uh

dressed up as a harlot and she hit her face and she conceived by yuda and when it was revealed that she was pregnant with a child and they didn't know who the father was they started accusing her the whole town was was a was against her and they literally tied her up to the stake and were ready to burn her alive and she never told any she didn't say that he's responsible he did this to me he's the one who didn't keep his work she kept quiet she didn't want to hurt his honor but you yudah in front of everybody came out and admitted openly and he was a very important time a person at the time

and he had a lot to lose in terms of his status and his his his respect and his place in society and the minute that he admitted he says i'm at fault i'm responsible tamar is not responsible take her down release her free her i'm the one who did it that act of taking responsibility admitting what he had done made such a loud noise had such a huge impact on the heavens on the heavenly courts above that it entitled him to be of the lineage that from him will come the kingdom of israel the kings king david king solomon and himself would come from judah not from the first born reuven not from the

holy yosef not from all the other brothers badafka from buddha and if you take the name you die in hebrew it means it comes to the word lodot which means in english to admit to admit so we are called you deem choose from the word you da we are people that are meant to be willing to admit and take responsibility for ourselves and be responsible for what we do this is our big tikkun now the problem is that when you look at self-esteem and if somebody on the issue of self-esteem today it really has to do with being a central part of our our personality self-esteem is comprised of basically two

things one that i feel competent as a person i am aware i do a of an adequate um accurate estimate of my abilities of my strengths of my talents and on the other side i know that i am worthy i have value self value if i do an adequate and a correct estimate of these two things of my abilities and my self-worth then not only do i feel confident that i have the ability to do to get through every challenge that i face in my life but also that i will do it in the best way possible because of my self-worth and i'm worthy of love and i'm worthy of happiness and i'm worthy of satisfaction and

feeling good in myself and i don't have to be afraid of failure now here we go go back to the original sin everybody's afraid of failure a lot of people what if i fail what are they going to say what are you going to think about me i'll never work again in this town we don't need to be afraid in the uh tractate of giten in the deaf on the first daf there it talks about it says what is the translation of that this failure there is no person there is no human being that can master and be uh or complete torah or do torah unless he first fails in it it's a huge huge what does that mean this is

talking about in this particular gemara this demo particular tractate of tomwood it's talking about a halachic authority of posek that failed had made a big error in judgment in terms of one of his halachic decisions and only later after the fact he realized that he was wrong and from that realization he strengthened himself and his resolve and his awareness of his task and his role and he became more serious and more knowledgeable about his role he learned and he became a better halacric authority through the failures that's what the torah is saying through these failures we learn and we

become stronger and only through those failures we can achieve and become better people stronger and more effective people but we have to be expecting these failures we have to know that i have a tendency throughout my life to fail and make mistakes and they will come over and over it's not the question of if i will fail the question is how will i handle it when i do how will i overcome it how will i get by how will i respond react it's a lot like if you look about what is free choice we call in hebrew i once heard a very good lecture where the speaker asked the audience he says what is what

is free will a couple of people raised their hands and they said free well that's easy you decide what you do or what happens to you in life that's not quite true did you decide where you were born decide how you look if you've got to wear glasses if you're tall if you're short if you're thin if you're uh american or israeli or english or australian i mean you didn't have much of a choice of that you were just kind of thrown into it a lot of things happened to you in your life you didn't have much control over that if you think about it most of the things that happen in our life we don't have

much control over but what do i have control over so what is free will i have free will in not what happens to me in life but how i respond to what happens to me in life how i react to those things how i choose to take those things how i feel about myself and how i evaluate or how i feel in terms of my self-esteem about my abilities and my competence and my value and worth to overcome these things and even if i fail i'm not bad i'm not a failure it's just maybe that one particular thing i did wasn't good doesn't mean that i'm not good or maybe that thing wasn't right it wasn't appropriate it

wasn't healthy for me but it doesn't mean i'm a failure that's not supposed to be my my conclusion every time something happens i think that any real strong person can take every failure and turn it into a success and learn from those failures and become stronger and think of it as a part of your life a part of our path our journey in this life of ours so i wished it and i hope that all of us will not be afraid any longer of failures and mistakes and we recognize that we all come from the same place we all come from adam richon from the first man and woman and that we all have the tendency to

be flawed and imperfect and that's what makes us human and that's what makes us special without it we wouldn't be who we are thank you and shalom may the best view with all of you thank you you