“We saw the Nephilim there—the Anakites are part of the Nephilim—and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” (Numbers 13:33)
What other people think of us is none of our business. We spend so much psychic energy worrying about what other people think of us. Are we considered smart or hip or mean or... you fill in the blank? Rather, we should devote our energies to what we think of ourselves. Learning from this story, we ought to turn off the negative self-talk. We need to stop putting ourselves down saying things like I wish I was as tall or as smart, as beautiful or as insightful as others. We must learn to identify when we do it, first becoming conscious that we are doing it. Then we must replace that with kindness to ourselves and positive reinforcement acknowledging we are capable of so much more than we thought.
Greenburgh Hebrew Center rabbistein@ghcny.org 515 Broadway Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522 914-693-4260 office@ghcny.org www.ghcny.org
