First-principles thinking by Dr. Elliot Resnick on Arutz Sheva here.
An excerpt:
What’s the difference between promoting self-esteem and promoting humility if a caveat needs to be added either way?
The difference is that humility is a middah that’s extolled in virtually every single Jewish ethical work ever written whereas self-esteem appears as a virtue in almost no Jewish ethical work at all.
…
Frum self-esteem proponents – desperate for legitimacy – comb through all of Torah literature and manage to come up with a smattering of sources to support their position. For example, the Gemara says that a person should think, “For me alone the world was created.” Rav Tzadok HaKohen writes that a person should believe in himself. The Alter of Slabodka would often stress that man is great.
Yet, all these statements are clearly only prologues to unspoken conclusions.
“For me alone the world was created” – and therefore I have to fulfill my destiny.
Man is great – and therefore I have a responsibility to develop myself and serve Hashem to the best of my ability. An implicit “therefore” always follows.
The Torah doesn’t sanction feeling good about oneself as an independent value (which is what the self-esteem movement promotes). It may believe in feeling good about one’s potential or one’s pure soul so that one lives up to that potential and one does credit to that soul. But this attitude is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.