The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family's positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.

I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection.

There's a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It's a narrative of hope.

Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed.

We're in a hyper-connected world, and there's a crisis of connection. The first thing that God says about woman and man in the Bible is that it's not right for humans to be alone. Social media interaction cannot take the place of face-to-face interaction. If anything, it prevents us from doing that. We're staring into our screens for so long that we're forgetting to look at the people directly in front of us.

The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.