One thing that a great many unhappy people have in common is insecurity.

We were born hard-wired to need love. We crave a sense of belonging. When we sense that these things are lacking in our lives, we feel insecure. And that can easily lead to feelings of melancholy, anger, jealousy and even hate. In fact, we can trace many bad middos back to this single root cause.

We are so easily thrown off balance. Feeling insecure means not experiencing ourselves as grounded in the things we need. When that happens, the very earth beneath our feet is shaky. Babies who are not given the love they need can develop deep emotional deficits, r”l. Adults facing a similar problem have more recourses and more practice at camouflaging the pain. But feeling unwanted can hurt just as much.

Suppose you’re walking down the street when you catch sight of someone you recently met. At the time, you believed that the two of you hit it off. Now you’re not so sure. If she took such a liking to you when you first met, why is she acting now as if she doesn’t even see you?

A little worm of insecurity begins to gnaw at your innards. Almost automatically, you jump to conclusions. And those conclusions are mostly negative.

Depending on our personality type, you may sink into gloom: “She must not have liked me as much as I thought. Maybe she was just pretending so as not to hurt my feelings.” Or “Guess I’m just not so good at holding onto people’s affections for long…”

You might get angry: “How dare she act so high and mighty! Does she think I’m not good enough for her?” Or “What horrible middos she has, to treat me this way!”

These negative emotions can, and often do, gouge a mark in our psyches deep enough to accompany us for the rest of the day, if not longer. Behind everything we do lies the niggling suspicion that we’re either unworthy of love or being somehow mistreated. Our mental assessment of the person in question instantly plunges to a new low, which can adversely color our interactions with them in the future.

None of this is good.

If we can brush aside that nasty worm of insecurity for a minute, we have a chance to recalibrate our reaction. To ignore our instinctive negative thoughts and substitute others in their place. We can try to come up with more generous reasons for the other person’s behavior than the ones our insecurity dictates.

For instance: “Maybe she has an appointment she can’t be late for. Rather than brush me off with a quick hello, she’d rather pretend that she doesn’t see me.” Or, “Maybe she’s got something on her mind that’s making her oblivious of everything around her. Maybe she really doesn’t see me!”

We can understand someone liking us well enough and yet be unwilling to sacrifice a longstanding appointment just for the pleasure of a good shmooze. We can grasp the notion of being so preoccupied that the world fades around us. After all, we could easily act the same way in the same circumstances. And probably have.

Still, the question hovers at the edge of our consciousness, ever ready to take center stage: Am I loved? It’s an existential question to which we feel compelled to seek answers. If this weren’t so, why would even the best relationships occasionally struggle with misunderstandings and hurt feelings? If we truly felt sufficiently loved, wouldn’t we simply be able to assume goodwill on the other person’s part and just let things go?

The fact that we so often get hung up on “what she said” and “what does he think of me” means that the love question never quite goes away. The underlying insecurity remains in place.

“Yes, he loves me,” we might think. “But does he love me enough?”

*****

Now, let’s transpose individual insecurity into national terms.

As the ones that Hakadosh Boruch Hu hand-picked, so to speak, from among all the nations of the world, you’d think we’d feel perfectly secure in His love. After all, He gave His word to Avrohom Avinu that Avrohom’s descendants would be His chosen ones, forever and ever.

But the trials and tribulations of this world can throw mud onto the clear glass of this understanding. It can leave us feeling abandoned and afraid, a child reaching out to hold his parent’s hand but not knowing whether it’s waiting there for him.

Nowhere was this truer than in Mitzrayim, where we were so cruelly subjugated thousands of years ago.

As evil taskmasters turned our lives into a living Gehinnom that stretched for decades and then centuries, we may have wondered if the G-d of our forefathers had given up on us. If He’d decided to forsake us. We clung to the memory of His bond with our forefathers: the single most cherished item in our national memory. But was it enough? Did Hashem still love us?

The insecurity that tortures an individual when he asks himself that question becomes magnified a thousandfold on the national scale. As in Mitzrayim, we become terrified at the possibility of being abandoned by the only One Who can help us. The One Who once promised to cherish us, but whose love we can’t always feel through our pain.

We can never know the mind of Hashem. We can only speculate, as so many of our Sages have done, about the reasons He subjected us to those horrific years of pain and oppression in that first, long-ago first exile. Just as we can only speculate about the suffering our people have endured in the ensuing centuries. But one thing we never need to ask ourselves is whether Hakadosh Boruch Hu still loves us.

In Mitzrayim, He “proved” His love through wonders and miracles that impacted not only the mightiest empire of the time, but also the entire civilized world. Our suffering as slaves was repaid and more than repaid in the unparalleled splendors of the Exodus, culminating in the greatest token of love of all: the giving of the Torah.

In the most magnificent and meaningful of ways, Hashem demonstrated that the bond was unbroken. More, that it is unbreakable.

And He has continued to demonstrate this all down the millennia, a truth discernable our very existence as a people as well as in our unprecedented contributions to world civilization. The hardships we’ve faced and continue to face keep us strong, united, and separate in holiness. There’s no need for insecurity when history itself keeps reminding us that we’re worthy of surviving. Worthy of carrying out our Divine mission in this world.

While we don’t know His reasons for our suffering, as we sit down to the Seder this year, we know something else. We embrace the same knowledge that our ancestors so joyously embraced back when the Pyramids were new: that there is a G-d, and that He chose us. A G-d Who cares for us with the most profound and unalterable love that we could possibly imagine… and beyond.

In that knowledge, may we all enjoy a chag kasher v’sameach!