A certain author told a story about his experiences after graduating college and beginning one of the top business schools in the United States. He wrote that throughout his life, ever since preschool, he was the undisputed top achiever of his class. Throughout elementary school, high school and college, he stood out and excelled beyond the rest. Suddenly, when he reached graduate school, he found that he was just one of 320 students in his grade, and he was nothing special. In fact, it always seemed like the other students were smarter than he was.
As he began his second year, he noticed something interesting – that many of his classmates felt the same way. This led him to an unusual idea. He decided to sit down and write a letter to the first-year students at the college. The letter said something to the effect of, “If you’re anything like me, you were always the top student wherever you were, and now, in this school, you feel like everyone else is smarter than you. You should just know that everyone feels that way. It’s ok. There’s nothing wrong with you.” And he signed his name.
One Friday, he made copies of this letter and placed them in all the first-year students’ mailboxes.
Over the weekend, he grew nervous about what he would find when he returned on Monday. What would the reaction be? Maybe he embarrassed himself? Maybe he made himself look like a fool?
When he got to school on Monday, his mailbox was stuffed with letters. He read them, one by one, and each and every letter thanked him for writing his letter. The new students felt overjoyed that their feelings were validated.
Twenty years later, this man attended his school’s reunion, and he learned that each and every year, for the previous twenty years, his letter was distributed to the entire incoming class – because everybody had that feeling when they first arrived at the school.
Think about it – each year, 300 or so of the brightest young minds in America felt inferior and inadequate.
What does this show?
It shows that no matter how much a person achieves, he is still prone to feeling he is not good enough. Feelings of inadequacy are not reserved for any particular group of people – not to any socioeconomic group, any religious group, or any other kind of group. It is something that so many people feel, no matter how successful and accomplished they are.
Why is this? Why do we often hear ourselves saying, “I’m a failure”; “I’m not as successful as others”; “Most other people do it so much better than I do”; “I’m not good enough”; “I don’t do anything well”? Why do so many people look at their bank statements and think they aren’t financially successful; look at their children and think they aren’t successful parents; look at their marriages and think they aren’t successful spouses; and look at their homes and think they aren’t good homemakers? Why do so many people who accomplish so much, who work so hard, look at themselves as inadequate?
The Judge in Our Brain
It all begins when we are young children.
As infants, children can do anything they want without any expectations or limitations. They are fed when they cry, they are never forced to be quiet or to say anything, and they perform their bodily functions whenever they need to. Gradually, however, they become subject to rules. They are told what to do and what not to do, and when and how to do certain things. And these rules are enforced through criticism and punishments. Around the same time, the children attend playgroup, preschool and then school, where they see and interact with other children, virtually all of whom are better than they are at something. Some children are smarter, some are more athletic, some are more artistic, some are better looking, some are more socially adept, and some have fancier clothing.
Children thus begin feeling insecure and inferior. A “judge” grows in their brain and regularly issues the “ruling” that they are inadequate, that they are not _________ enough. That blank is filled in, at different times, with adjectives such as smart, sociable, strong, tall, skinny, attractive, sharp, quick, athletic, agile, musical, artistic and popular. This “judge” tells them that their family is not as good as other people’s families, their grades aren’t as good as other people’s, and they don’t have as many friends as other people. Several times a day, every day, they hear criticism from this noisy, pesky “judge” in their mind.
Virtually all of us heard this “judge” in our minds as youngsters, and in all likelihood, we assumed that he would go away when we grew up. But when people grow up, that “judge” stays. They get better at faking it, at pretending they are secure and confident, but they still here constant criticism from that unrelenting “judge” in their minds that always finds fault with everything do and with everything they are.
I, for one, plead guilty.
The night before I delivered a class on this exact topic – overcoming feelings of inadequacy – my daughter called, and asked what I was going to speak about in my weekly class.
“I don’t really like the class I’ve prepared,” I replied.
“Come’on, Daddy,” she persisted. “What’s the class about?”
I told her the topic – and then it hit me: I just did it! I just criticized myself in my mind, telling myself I wasn’t good enough.
This is how susceptible we are to this feeling – even as I was preparing a class about avoiding these feelings, I was experiencing them.
So, what’s the solution? How can we stop telling ourselves we are inadequate? And what should we do if we honestly and truly believe we are inadequate?
When Half is a Whole
The Torah addresses this phenomenon in presenting the mitzvah of מחצית השקל – the half-shekel coin which each Jew was commanded to donate to the Bet Ha’mikdash each year. We commemorate this mitzvah on the Shabbat before Rosh Hodesh Adar, the day when people were called upon to make this donation. We call this Shabbat “Shabbat Shekalim” and we read the section of the Torah where this command is presented.
It is very significant that the mitzvah is to give not a whole coin, but specifically half a coin. The Torah is telling us that all that Hashem expects of us is that we do the best we can. We will never be able to give a “whole,” to be perfect, to live without making mistakes, or even to live without making a lot of mistakes. I readily confess to making zillions of mistakes all the time. But I know that all that is expected of us is “half” – that we do the “half” that we are capable of doing, and then Hashem will consider it a whole.
An inspiring story from the Holocaust beautifully illustrates this point.
A woman who survived the Bergen Belsen concentration camp passed away at the age of 101, and after her passing, her family found a fascinating artifact among her papers. It was a prayer composed by the Chief Rabbi of Holland, who was also in the camp at the time. It seems that as Pesach approached, the inmates realized that not only would they be unable to eat matzah and observe the seder, but they would need to eat bread in order to sustain themselves. Seeing the sorrow of his fellow inmates, the Rabbi wrote down a special prayer for them to recite before eating bread on Pesach. The prayer was something to the effect of, “Our Father in heaven, it is revealed before You that we want to celebrate this holiday of Pesach, that we want to eat matzah and refrain from hametz, but as we face a situation of life-threatening hunger, we need to eat hametz to fulfill the command You wrote in the Torah, וחי בהם – that we must care for our lives.”
This is a remarkable example of how “half” can be “whole.” When all we are capable of is “half,” then the half that we do is really “whole” – everything that is expected of us. That Pesach in Bergen Belsen, eating bread was as great a mitzvah as eating matzah under ordinary circumstances. This was the Rabbi’s message to his fellow prisoners – that they had no reason at all to feel inadequate or inferior because they were eating bread on Pesach. They were doing what they could – and this is exactly what Hashem wants of us: to do the best we can under our conditions.
This is a vitally important mindset that we need to develop. We must realize that half is entirely acceptable as long as we’re trying and working to be better. We are not expected to be perfect. We are expected to try, to give the “half” that we are capable of giving. And we all achieve. All of us who work hard, who exert effort, have what to be proud of. We all deserve credit – not for being perfect, for giving a whole “shekel,” something which nobody does, but for giving “half,” for trying.
Rewiring the Brain
How do we create this מחצית השקל mindset? How can we begin feeling good about what we achieve, without constantly fretting and feeling depressed over what we haven’t achieved?
Here are three simple, practical suggestions for rewiring our brains, for changing our perception from “I’m not good enough” to “I’m really good.”
· Listing three accomplishments every night. Each and every night, before going to sleep, we should list in our minds three things that we accomplished that day. These “accomplishments” don’t have to be something extraordinary, like donating a million dollars to charity or completing the study of the Talmud. It could be doing our job properly in the office, preparing dinner for the family, helping a friend or fellow employee, giving somebody a lift, spending some time learning or attending a class. This brief, one-minute exercise should be done each and every day, 365 days a year. This will help us recognize just how much we accomplish, and will accustom us to acknowledging all the good that we do in our lives.
· Identify the “judge” when he starts talking, and then tell him to be quiet. When we hear ourselves saying that we are inadequate and not good enough, we need to catch ourselves and stop. The more we stop the judge from talking, the less likely he is to open his mouth.
· Ask each morning, “Why does the world need me today?” We all have somebody who needs us and relies on us each day. We all have tasks to perform every day. We all have something we need to do to contribute to somebody, to some cause, every day. If we focus on that every morning right when we get started, we will greet the day with vitality, excitement, and a sense of purpose.
These three techniques will help us find the “half-shekel,” all the good that we do and all that we accomplish, so we stop berating ourselves over the other half that we haven’t accomplished.
The Right Way to Look Back
But what if even after all this, a person still feels inferior? What if a person says, “That’s fine for somebody who is generally pretty good but not perfect. I, however, am just not good. I’ve done some pretty bad things. How am I supposed to feel adequate?”
The answer to such a question comes from the Mishnah in Masechet Berachot, which tells of the חסידים הראשונים, a group of especially pious people in earlier generations, who would spend a full hour preparing themselves for prayer. Before each of the three daily prayers, they would mentally prepare themselves for an hour. Surprisingly, the Mishnah tells that these men would also spend an hour reflecting after each of the three daily prayers.
We must wonder, what were they thinking about after they prayed? Why didn’t they just go home? What did they spend this hour doing?
The commentators explain that these men spent an hour thinking about the deficiencies in the prayer they had just recited. They would reflect on the words they may have pronounced incorrectly, or the times when they did not properly concentrate, when their minds wandered onto other things.
In other words, these חסידים הראשונים reflected after each prayer how they could make the next prayer better. Recognizing that even they, on their exceptional level of piety, were imperfect, they took the time to think about what they could improve.
If a person truly and honestly feels he is inadequate because of serious flaws in his behavior or character, this is what he should do: think about what he does not like about his behavior and character, and tell himself he will try to improve. If he does this, then he is no less than any other person. If we are seriously thinking about our deficiencies and we sincerely try to make ourselves better, then we are giving exactly what Hashem expects of us – a מחצית השקל, the imperfect “coin” that He wants us to donate.
We should all be looking back at our mistakes – but not to become depressed or to see ourselves as failures, but so that we can try to be better. This is something that each and every person can do. No matter what we’ve done in the past, we can all become better. And this is the מחצית השקל that Hashem wants – to work on being better, realizing that we will never be perfect.
President Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in 1910 in which he expresses this concept very powerfully. He said:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
We must all enter “the arena,” make the effort to grow and achieve. By definition, this means that we will, on occasion, err, come up short, and fail. We will only achieve a “half-shekel,” and never a whole one, because we are human and thus imperfect. But we need to try, realizing that all Hashem wants from us is that we do our best.
The Significance of Our Actions
In conclusion, there is also another reason to recognize our achievements and give ourselves credit despite our imperfections.
An American couple once traveled to Israel and sat in a restaurant in Herzliya. The wife looked out the window and realized that if they sat on the restaurant’s second floor, they could enjoy a beautiful view. And so they moved upstairs, where a waiter came over to them and introduced himself as Barak.
When he returned to the counter, the wife told her husband that they should ask their waiter, Barak, what his mother’s name was. Her husband thought this was strange, but she insisted and assured him that she would explain. Sure enough, when the waiter returned, they asked what his mother’s name was, and, with a puzzled look on his face, he answered, “Orna.”
“Really?” the woman asked. “Tell me, did you fight in the war in Gaza in the summer of 2014?”
“Yes!” Barak exclaimed. “How did you know that?”
The woman explained that Jews around the world prayed for the Israeli soldiers during the war, and there was a group that assigned different people names of soldiers for them to pray for. She was given the name Barak ben Orna, and she put the name on her refrigerator and recited Tehillim for him each day. She often wondered how Barak was doing, whether he was wounded or killed, if he was succeeding in the dangerous missions given to him.
“I can’t believe I am seeing you here today,” she said.
Barak was amazed. He was astonished that a woman he never met from the other side of the world prayed for him while he served during the war. “Actually, it was very difficult,” he said. “We were given very dangerous missions, and some of my friends were hurt and killed. I am very fortunate to have come out of the war perfectly fine.”
Two weeks later, the woman received an email from Barak. He told her that he had been putting on tefillin each day since they met in the restaurant, and that he planned on continuing doing so every day in the future. He hadn’t touched his tefillin for years, but after seeing that Hashem sent him a customer from the other side of the world who prayed for him, he felt he needed to begin growing in his religious observance.
Why do we so often feel like we’re not good enough? It is not because we fail, but because we fail to appreciate how significant all our actions are. We see that even though we work hard raising our children, they aren’t turning out the way we want. We see that even though we work hard on our marriage, it still isn’t as good as we want. We pray for ill patients, but they don’t recover. We attend classes and try to improve ourselves, but we don’t see ourselves growing. What we’re missing in all of this is the significance of everything we do, of every bit of effort we put in, and of every small success that we achieve. The woman in this story would never have imagined that her Tehillim recitation actually protected a soldier’s life, but it did. Our actions are worth far more than we think they are. Every little "half-shekel” that we give, every bit of work and effort we invest, even if the result is far from perfect, is so valuable and so precious.
So let’s stop feeling inadequate or inferior to other people. We are all the same – we have many significant achievements that we can and should feel proud of, and we have made many mistakes and have much room to improve. Every person is a מחצית השקל. And as long as we’re trying hard to do our half, then we are definitely good enough.