[1] Crossing Boundaries is the perfect book for this summer’s travel season. Published during the pandemic, when traveling was all but closed, this book encourages travel as a path to personal growth and community peace building in a world marked by escalating conflict and division. Today, although the pandemic is over and the world even more divided, this book helps readers think about both traveling and living as peacebuilders.
[2] The foundation of Sarah’s travel ethic is both his joie de vivre and his deep faith in dialogue as a means to deeper understanding and companionship. Sarah loves new experiences and his love is infectious. His ability to narrate a difficult passage as a new opportunity to grow is inspiring. In addition, he offers evidence and apologetics for this faith in dialogue through the stories he tells of his own revelations through conversation and his experiences witnessing unlikely partnerships cooperating for a common goal. He justifies his underlying belief that most people are kind and generous with story after story of the kind and charitable people he has met.
[3] Sarah, himself, is a Palestinian, who grew up in Jerusalem and, as such, was not allowed a passport. He grew up amidst dangerous conflict; when he was 10 his brother was tortured to death by Israeli soldiers. His love of travel and peacebuilding seems unlikely. Yet, he was transformed by his experience as a young adult learning Hebrew in Jerusalem with new Jewish immigrants to Israel. He recounts this as his first travel experience—simply going to a new part of a city in which he lived, and talking to people he believed were his enemies.
[4] Throughout his book, he exhorts those with the means to travel to do so even if it means just going across town. In fact, he implores readers to consider that it might be a more novel experience to go into a new neighborhood than to go across the world to a resort that caters to one’s own culture. He asserts that it is not the geographical distance but the boundary crossed that makes travel rewarding. To repeat, it may be not only more economical but a greater cultural experience to spend a weekend in an area of one’s own city that one previously avoided than taking a trip across the ocean.
[5] Importantly, while Sarah encourages travel across cultural boundaries, he provides ethical guidelines for travelers. These guidelines, he suggests will help make the reader’s travel an experience that is life-giving and peacebuilding for the visitor and those they visit as well. Chief among these guidelines are taking time to meet people when traveling, being wary of stereotypes. Sarah hopes readers will allow themselves to be surprised by the people and the places. Sarah encourages attending religious services in these new places and in a faith that is different than one’s own.
[6] Sarah acknowledges that women often need to be a “different type of careful” than men while traveling because of the effects of patriarchy in many cultures. The chapter for women’s guidelines is written by Ellie Clearly who uses her own experiences to provide advice and insights. Chief among these insights is that while women do need to travel differently sometimes, there is often less danger than one might think. Again, Clearly suggests that one beware of assuming wrong stereotypes while trusting one’s own instincts. She insists on the importance of finding trustworthy people in each new place to serve as guides.
[7] The best advice in the book is Sarah’s exuberant admonition that one must accept disaster as part of the experience. Whether this disaster is a travel delay or a trip to a prison in Egypt, Sarah’s accounts highlight the humor and the growth he experienced when disaster struck. When disaster strikes, Sarah suggests travelers be patient with others and also with themselves. He urges travelers not to self-flagellate for mistakes, but to be happy to be corrected in order to learn and go forward. He writes that injustice is real, but that one should never hate a whole group of people because of one individual who hurts another. Sarah suggests that all things may work for a later good if we see them as learning experiences and accept that life is about experiences.
[8] This is a guide that that makes the reader want to travel. It impresses upon the reader to go to new places. He spends significant time talking about travel to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Yet, he also notes the importance of applying these same lessons in one’s regular day to day life. I read this book while traveling in Northern Ireland to see family members there. A small section on the peace process in Northern Ireland was especially poignant for me. But as I read the book, I found it gave me lessons not only for traveling but for living.
[8] Sarah hosts dual narrative travel experiences in the Holy Land. He is currently on a book tour with co-author Maoz Inon promoting their recent book, The Future is Peace.
