As Lou and Carol arrive at Camp Moriah, Lou approaches Gwyn and Pettis in the parking lot to apologize for his behavior toward them the previous day, particularly his annoyance with Gwyn, and thanks her for being willing to challenge him. The session begins with Avi posing the central question for the day: how to turn a heart at war into a heart at peace. Avi points out that Lou has already experienced such a change, as he now sees and feels differently about the people in the room than he did the previous morning. Avi then shares his own story. He was 15 during the 1973 Yom Kippur War when his father was killed fighting Syrian forces. Consumed by grief and rage, Avi lashed out at his best friend, an Israeli Arab named Hamish, blaming him and others who “prayed and looked like him” for his father’s death and driving Hamish away (165). Avi’s hatred subsequently expanded to Arabs generally and then to Jews who didn’t share his hatred, eventually contributing to intense self-loathing and two suicide attempts after he moved to the United States. After his second suicide attempt, Avi received an invitation to join a 40-day survival program run by Yusuf, an Arab faculty member at Arizona State University. Avi initially refused, but his mother insisted that he attend.

At this point in the story, Yusuf asks to share a more recent event involving Jenny, the teenager who ran away the previous morning. He introduces two young staff members, Mei Li and Mike, who followed her for hours. They recount how Jenny was running barefoot and her feet began to bleed. When she refused to have shoes brought to her and rejected Mei Li’s offer of her own shoes, Mei Li and Mike took off their own shoes and continued to follow her barefoot for another three hours. Lou is confused about what their actions accomplished, and Yusuf explains that although they inconvenienced themselves, their act accomplished something of great importance.

Mei Li and Mike finish their story, explaining that after following Jenny for several hours, they ended up at a mall where Jenny met a friend. The friend, seeing Jenny’s bloody feet and the equally bloody feet of Mei Li and Mike, remarked, “Hell, Jenny, I’d never run around this city barefoot for you” (172). After the group talked further and Jenny asked Mei Li and Mike about Camp Moriah, she agreed to attend the program. Mei Li didn’t know whether removing their shoes influenced Jenny’s decision, but Yusuf explains that the significance of their action lies in what it could invite. Mei Li adds that taking off her shoes was a way of joining Jenny in her world, which helped Mei Li maintain a heart at peace.

Yusuf connects this principle to leadership, asking leaders to distinguish necessary accommodations from privileges they retain because they consider themselves more important or deserving than others. He argues that leaders should consider whether they’re creating workplaces that employees are as excited about and devoted to as they are. Lou initially pushes back, arguing that his hard work entitles him to these perks. Yusuf observes that people who are followed only because of force or need are called “tyrants.” This triggers a painful memory for Lou of a fired executive using that exact word to describe him. Lou begins contrasting his own leadership with that of former executive Kate, recalling that she parked at the far end of the lot and even helped the janitorial staff. Lou finally admits that his own leadership has been the problem, exclaiming, “I’m the mess” (177). Yusuf then suggests that Kate metaphorically “took off her shoes” (178), creating a space at Zagrum where people could set aside their worries and thrive.

Feeling overwhelmed by his failures, Lou sinks into a state of despair. Yusuf tells him that this feeling of being stuck is a lie. While Lou can’t force others to change, he can, like Mei Li with Jenny, create an invitation for them to change. To illustrate this, Avi resumes his story. During the wilderness program, Yusuf sat with Avi as he shared positive memories of his father, giving Avi an opportunity to reconnect with the love and grief he had shut away. The realization that an Arab had helped him heal made it difficult for Avi to sustain his generalized hatred.

Over the following days, Avi began remembering his childhood friend Hamish and feeling the weight of his cruel rejection of him. He confessed his actions to Yusuf, who encouraged him to find his own way to make amends. Inspired by a century plant—a desert succulent that lives 15 to 25 years but flowers only once, in the last year of its life, before dying and seeding a new generation—Avi saw a symbol of his lost friendship. He wrote a heartfelt letter of apology to Hamish, enclosing a seed from the plant as a symbol of hope for renewal.

Avi reveals that he never received a reply. He later learned that Hamish’s family had moved and that Hamish was killed among civilians in rocket attacks from Lebanon prior to the Lebanon War of 1982. Avi doesn’t know whether the letter ever reached him. Despite the tragic outcome, Avi explains that writing the letter changed him. Even if it didn’t reach Hamish, it “reached [Avi],” representing what he describes as an inward recovery of their friendship. This allowed him to begin seeing and accepting the humanity of those he had previously gone to war against, including Arabs, Americans, Jews, his family, and himself.

Avi outlines the practical steps for what he calls the “getting-out-of-the-box process” (187), a method for escaping the state of self-deception and blame. The first step is to recognize the signs of being in the box, such as blame, self-justification, and seeing others through a distorted lens. He clarifies that since a person can be “in the box” toward one person while remaining “out of the box” toward another (187), people generally have relationships or memories that remain free from blame, and self-justification and can provide an out-of-the-box vantage point.

The second, important step is to deliberately access an “out-of-the-box place” (187). This is an internal or external vantage point free from blame and self-justification. For Avi, Yusuf helped create an out-of-the-box place around him by remaining out of the box toward him despite Avi’s resistance, while his positive memories of his father provided an internal one. Avi suggests several ways to find such a place: thinking of people with whom one has a good relationship (which makes Lou think of his daughter, Mary, and later Carol); remembering a time when someone showed you undeserved kindness (Lou recalls his father’s compassion after he dumped their new car into the Hudson); or engaging with art, music, or activities that bring someone to an out-of-the-box vantage point.

The third step is to “ponder the situation anew” from this out-of-the-box vantage point (192). By stepping outside the blame and self-justification of the box, a person can access new thoughts and ideas that were previously unavailable. Yusuf adds that this step involves learning to ask “the right questions” about the conflict (193).

To illustrate the process of pondering anew, Yusuf tells his own story. He grew up in Jerusalem filled with a desire for revenge for his father’s death. As a young man, he became a cell leader for Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist group, building a network of over 5,000 volunteer soldiers before being stripped of his leadership in 1962 when a nephew of Arafat took over the region. He was then left further disillusioned and bitter after the Arab forces’ crushing defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. After searching unsuccessfully for another Arab cause to take up, he moved to the US, where he met Maeve, a blind Irish student. She listened as he shared his experiences and grievances but resisted his attempts to get her to commiserate with him, eventually telling him that he was “wallowing” in his pain.

Maeve shared that she had been blinded by a rubber bullet fired by a British soldier. For years, she was consumed with hatred until her mother helped her realize that seeing the soldier as a person was not to excuse his action but to see the situation truthfully. Maeve wrote him a letter. She stresses to Yusuf that her freedom from hatred didn’t depend on receiving his response: She had already felt free during the three months before his reply and apology arrived. She explains that “[her] letter did” free her (206).

Yusuf explains that this story helped him to ponder anew by asking questions that led him to consider other people’s experiences as well as his own role in their burdens. On the board, he lists questions to facilitate this shift, such as, “How am I, or some group of which I am a part, adding to these challenges, trials, burdens, and pains?” (206). A few years after meeting Maeve, Yusuf returned to Jerusalem to find Mordechai, the elderly beggar he had known from the streets. After learning that Mordechai had died alone, Yusuf initially felt resistance when another beggar asked him for money, recognized this reaction as a sign of the box, asked her name, and then gave her all the money he was carrying in Mordechai’s name. As Lou listens, he feels a powerful urge to write to Cory, win back Kate, and change how he has been treating Carol, but he worries that this newfound resolve won’t last.

Yusuf reveals the fourth and final step in the process, which is essential for staying out of the box: A person must act on the sense or desire to help that arises once their perspective has shifted. He directs the group to the diagram on the board, explaining that the moment when a person feels a genuine desire to help another, they’re out of the box. To remain out, they must honor that sense; to betray it is to return to the box and the need for self-justification.

Lou presses for specific strategies, but Yusuf insists that he can’t provide them. The right action is unique to each person and situation, and the desire to take it must come from within. Just as Avi felt the need to write to Hamish and Yusuf felt the need to find Mordechai, Lou must act on the specific feelings he now has toward Cory, Carol, and perhaps someone at work.

Lou questions whether this inner peace can solve large-scale outer conflicts. Yusuf concedes that it can’t solve complex wars alone, but such problems can’t begin to be solved without it. A heart at peace allows a person to see the situation clearly and to exert “influence toward peace instead of provocation toward war” (216). When Elizabeth asks how to help others change, Yusuf states that the first step is to change oneself. The next is to “work to help things go right”—what Yusuf describes as “subtle, deep work” (217).