It is about 3:30AM in the morning as I write this. I was sleeping in my hotel bed, if not soundly than at least reasonably well, and I had a troubling dream. In this dream, some sort of horrifying winds were tearing up all the big trees around and I and others were trying to escape from one disaster to another, until finally I was woken from my fitful slumber by an argument that I was having with someone else who was praising their ability to give information about the problems that speakers faced in our religious traditions and who could not fathom that the surgeons whom she worked for were monsters for their mutilation of children. It is not often very difficult for us to see the monstrous in other people, but it can be a hard thing for us to see the monstrous in ourselves and in our friends and people we work with who are nice to us and with whom we get along. And since I can no longer sleep, I figured I might as well write, as it is precisely this problem brought up in my dream that led me to reflect, when sleep fled from my eyes, in some of the moral purposes of travel itself.

Most people are not great travelers. When my mother was growing up in the same area where I later grew up, a substantial number of her classmates had never been outside of their county, which would only have required a trip of half an hour to accomplish, and to have been outside of the state of Florida made one a daring and adventurous traveler, much less having gone outside of the country. Only some 20-25% of the people of the United States even have a passport, a sort of provincialism I was reminded of in this trip by an attractive young woman who was trying to get through the security line in Portland without having any sort of identification to do so, seeing as she had no driver’s license nor any passport with her, despite going to an airport where such documents are routinely used. One of the great drivers of my own traveling has been my religious beliefs, which compel at least one trip every year to go to a place where God has placed His name to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles (what the Jews call Sukkoth, for the temporary dwellings involved), and though one can often find a place to attend relatively close to home, there is a great deal of worth in travel to other lands.

I do not wish to state or imply that it is merely going to other lands that gives one a moral superiority or advantage over others. One need not travel well when one travels. One can often, if one chooses, to travel in such a fashion that one never encounters other people outside of a small circle, or never leaves a very narrow bubble nor finds travel experiences that are very challenging to oneself. The moral benefits of travel come not so much from the places that one sees–even though such places may be breathtakingly beautiful–as from the ways in which our experiences and interactions with others allow us to not only better to recognize the immense diversity of people despite our common nature and humanity, but also to recognize ourselves better. Travel is not only an exploration of the outer world and its beauties and features, but also is an effort to plumb the depths of our internal world, to recognize the fit that exists (or does not exist) between ourselves and those around us.

After all, travel involves many aspects that are frequently uncomfortable or unpleasant, besides those which are pleasant. Our internal clocks are screwed up by jet lag, leading us to nap in the mid-afternoon or not be able to be asleep at night. Our digestive systems have to deal with the absence of familiar food and eating things that may not always agree with us because they are prepared and cooked with different ingredients or with different oils and seasonings or in different ways. We may be having to deal with others who speak different languages than ourselves and we may struggle to understand what is going on and need others around us who are locals, some of whom are being paid for their local knowledge and willingness to assist the clueless tourist, to give good options and keep the tourist safe and sound by their better knowledge of local laws and ways. It is a cruel thing to laugh at the misfortune of others who do not know the way when we know the way and do not show them the way, and travel, like the education of children, is one of the ways in which this cruelty often comes to the surface. Travel often puts us at a disadvantage, forcing us to see through the eyes of the vulnerable and of the stranger, and people are not always very welcoming or gracious to the stranger, whether that stranger is us or someone who may be very different than us in superficial appearance but the same in being a foreigner and an outsider.

Travel, when it is done correctly, reveals who we are when we are put on the wrong foot, when we are assailed by exhaustion and overwhelmed by the difficulty of communicating with others, when we are lost and confused, and vulnerable to being taken advantage of by those with high degrees of savvy and local knowledge but low levels of grace and morality. This is not always a pleasant realization. Yet the moral education of travel consists not in seeing beautiful old ruins–even if there is much in seeing them that can inspire us to think about the temporary and passing nature of human achievement and effort–nor in the sight of beauties of human and divine creation–although such sights are awe-inspiring and can greatly encourage us to better reflect on what God has made–but rather in putting ourselves in a position where we may see ourselves as those on the outside, as those at a disadvantage, as those who are ignorant and lost and needing help and guidance. Understanding what it feels to be in such a position, something that most people instinctively shy away from experiencing, is what helps us to be people who are more kind and gracious to those who are vulnerable among us, and whose innocence and vulnerability is their chief claim to our protection. And it is by choosing to protect what is vulnerable instead of exploiting it that makes us decent people and not monsters. To the extent that travel is worthwhile, it is because our observation and experience leads to reflection and insight of ourselves and the world around us.