Moses Is Our True Founding

When Faced With A Challenge, Happy Families, Like Happy People, Just Add A New Chapter To Their Life Story That Shows Them Overcoming The Hardship. This Skill Is Particularly Important For Children, Whose Identity Tends To Get Locked In During Adolescence.

If You Tell Your Own Story To Your Children - That Includes Your Positive Moments And Your Negative Moments, And How You Overcame Them - You Give Your Children The Skills And The Confidence They Need To Feel Like They Can Overcome Some Hardship That They've Felt.

My Name Is Bruce Feiler, And I'm An Explainaholic. I First Heard This Word Used To Describe Isaac Asimov, And I Knew Instantly That I Suffered From The Same Condition. It's The Incurable Desire To Tell, Shape, Share, Occasionally Exaggerate, Often Elongate, And Inevitably Bungle A Good Story.

When I Was Growing Up, I, Like Many Jews, Cheered What Appeared To Be The Receding Of Faith From Everyday Life. The Further Religion Got From Our Lives The Better Our Lives Would Get, I Thought, Because Persecution Had Been Such A Burden To Jewish Families For Generations.

You Don't Need A Grand Plan, You Don't Need To Go Back To The Ancestors And Rewrite The Rules. You Just Need To Take Small Steps And Accumulate Small Wins.