It was déjà vu all over again.

Once again, I was hired by a still-under-construction museum, with great plans years in the making. But one difference in this project was significant: instead of an entirely new museum and exhibit being created from scratch, this was a redesign and relocation of a museum with a thirty-plus year history, an institution with an extensive collection of Holocaust-era artifacts and archives. Instead of working with newly donated objects, many with their provenance lost with the demise of their original owners, I was immersed in a world of historical objects and powerful histories that had been generously given and cared for over the decades.

I have the extraordinary privilege of being in private practice and teaching in Jerusalem where I work with young children and adolescents, parents and teachers, whole families and gap year students. It is from the gap year students that I am exposed to specific insights, experiences and realities for North American Jewish adolescents inching their way toward adulthood in the early 21st century. Theirs are stories of privilege and access, of opportunity and exposure, of close families that can also be complicated, about friendships that are confusing, and about identity formation in a time of technology and rapid change.

JournalCreditsThis chapter is excerpted from the book The Road to Resilience: From Chaos to Celebration, republished here with permission from the author and Toby Press. Community “The world is built with acts of kindness,” Psalms 89:3 In Jewish thought, creating...

Tony Wagner, Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard, often discusses the importance of experiencing failure in the learning process. Trial and error, he argues, inevitably involves error. How can we learn from our mistakes if we are never in a position to make a mistake? He cites real world examples from companies who follow this philosophy and post signs like “Fail early and fail often” and “If you haven’t failed, you haven’t tried” around the building. There is no innovation, Wagner says, without trial and error, and there cannot be trial and error if students are afraid of error.