A couple weeks ago, my wife and I set off on a drive up to Boston to see our daughter graduate from college and then a few days later over to Pittsburgh to see our son graduate with a Master’s degree. It won’t surprise you to hear that witnessing these two milestones got me thinking about life’s transitions and the swirl of excitement, loss, and uncertainty that frequently come with them.

As Bruce Feiler points out in his book, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, we spend more of our lives in flux than we realize. Life events can be good or bad. They can be determined by a decision that we make on our own or something that happens to us. Major life events also typically last about five years, and much of our adult lives are spent in unsettled states. This isn’t necessarily a negative thing—change can indicate growth and evolution—but it is the reality of most of our lives.

This sense of unsettledness is pervasive for many of us today. The world is changing faster than any of us could have imagined. Deep assumptions about our security, identity, friends, work, etc. are being challenged. And that is beyond changes that may be happening in our personal lives. All of this can get to be overwhelming. But that sense of instability is lessened and, in some ways, even reversed when we find community.

Feiler argues that a well-constructed life is one guided by the ABC’s—agency, belonging, and cause. To thrive, we need to feel like we can impact the world around us; that we have people to lean on; and have a way to serve something greater than ourselves. These three factors keep us grounded through life’s twists and turns, and they are all on offer in our community.

That’s what I hope people who engage with Federation and our partners come to feel, that Jewish Greater Washington is a place where they can commune with the ABC’s, across every life stage and within the ongoing story of Jewish peoplehood.

Our work as a Federation, therefore, is to ensure our community remains host to a grand Jewish playground, where people can come learn about themselves and find people with whom to climb through good times and bad no matter what’s going on in their lives.

That’s what I see as the beauty of community building. In choosing to join forces on our quest for meaning, we vastly improve each other’s odds of success. By engaging in Jewish discovery and expression together, we multiply each other’s agency, deepen each other’s sense of belonging, and further each other’s ability to pursue what matters to us most.

P.S. happy to recommend Bruce Feiler’s thoughtful guest essay in today’s New York Times.