Years in the classroom
A working mechanech in Passaic, New Jersey, with teaching experience that includes the Mesivta of Waterbury.
Background
Who he is, in plain terms.
Rabbi Kestenbaum is a mechanech — an educator — in Passaic, New Jersey, associated with Yeshiva Gedola Ohr Yitzchok.
He has taught at the Mesivta of Waterbury and continues to teach today. Each week he writes a column in the English Yated Ne’eman, where he works out, in public and in plain language, the same ideas that shape his teaching.
Much of his work happens one conversation at a time. He counsels parents and teens, and the questions they bring — about confidence, comparison, and self-worth — are the questions this book answers. The Self-Esteem Trap grows directly out of that classroom-tested, real-life work rather than out of theory alone.
Why this teacher
Qualified by the work, not the claim.
He does not present himself as a clinician or a celebrity. His standing comes from years spent teaching and counseling the very people who struggle with the questions this book addresses.
A weekly writing practice
His column in the English Yated Ne’eman means he has refined these ideas in writing, week after week, for a real readership.
Close to the struggle
He counsels parents and teens directly, so the book speaks to lived difficulty rather than to abstraction.
Grounded in Torah
His guidance draws on a Torah-based understanding of the self — the honest differentiator behind the book’s approach to self-worth.
The book began where the teaching does — in study, in writing, and in conversation.
“Accept your inherent importance, stop judging who you are, and start mastering what you do.”
Rabbi Aharon Kaufman Rosh Yeshivah, Yeshiva Ateres Shmuel of WaterburyOther works
More from Rabbi Kestenbaum.
Alongside The Self-Esteem Trap, he is the author of works in both Hebrew and English.
- Olam HaMiddos Hebrew
- Olam Ha’avodah Hebrew
- Run After the Right Kavod English
His book
Read the work this page describes.
The Self-Esteem Trap turns the classroom, the column, and the counseling into one concise, practicable book.