At fourteen, Shmuel Klein -- a scholarly boy who knew nothing of war -- was handed a prison full of soldiers and told to run it. He couldn't, so he told them the truth: you run it. I'll sit up front with my books and look official. And they did. When Passover came, he unlocked every cell, said he'd be gone a week, and asked them simply to keep up appearances. He returned to find every prisoner exactly where he'd left them. This is the story Aryae Coopersmith's grandfather told him before his bar mitzvah -- and it turned out to be less a family history than a lifelong instruction: "Trust the people in the room with you. Open the doors, and see what holds." Coopersmith spent the next seven decades testing that instruction: sparking friendship between a communist and a Republican through a high school newspaper, co-founding the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco (starting with a Presbyterian seminarian's $400 savings), building an HR community in Silicon Valley by getting people who never spoke to each other into the same room. The thread running through it all isn't ideology or ambition -- it's the circle itself. His own children completed the lesson one frantic dinner when his daughter looked up and said, "Dad, you need laughing lessons" -- and then she and her brother clowned until he broke.
