On the morning of September 11, 2001, Gander was a quiet town of fewer than 10,000 people on the island of Newfoundland, best known, if it was known at all, for an airport that had once been a major refueling stop for transatlantic flights.
But before the day was over, 38 diverted aircraft were sitting at Gander International Airport, carrying roughly 6,600 passengers and crew. In a matter of hours, the town's population had increased by almost seventy percent.
What happened next has since been told in books, documentaries and a hit Broadway musical. The people of Gander and surrounding communities turned schools, churches and halls into shelters, emptied kitchens and store shelves, cooked around the clock, donated everything from bedding to medicine, and served the visitors whatever they had — including plenty of local moose. Some simply took passengers home.
One of those passengers was a dear friend of mine, Rabbi Leivi Sudak, director of Chabad of Edgware in northwest London. He had flown out that morning on a brief trip to New York to pray at the Lubavitcher Rebbe's Ohel before Rosh Hashanah. Instead, he found himself housed in a school with around 500 other people, wondering how on earth he was going to find kosher food in Gander.
His savior that week was Eithne Smith, the schoolteacher running the shelter, who asked what he needed and gave him a kitchen. Rabbi Sudak bought new pots, rice, vegetables and fresh fish, and was soon cooking kosher meals for 28 observant Jewish passengers.
With Shabbat approaching, he went to the local liquor store and discovered, remarkably, two bottles of Manischewitz kiddush wine. Meanwhile, a fellow passenger in saffron robes — a Tibetan monk descended from a prominent Jerusalem Jewish family — spent hours peeling potatoes for the Friday night meal.
Throughout that week, Rabbi Sudak kept asking himself: "Why am I here? What is the purpose of all this?" One answer came in the shape of a local man named Ed Brake, a Holocaust survivor who had been sent as a child to live with a British family and had concealed his Jewish identity for decades. When he heard there was a rabbi in town, he asked to meet him.
Rabbi Sudak later sent him a kippah, tallit and siddur, and years later Brake's son told him that his father had asked to be buried with the kippah and tallit. It is a deeply moving detail from a day that shattered the world. A man who had hidden his Jewishness for most of his life met a rabbi because thirty-eight planes had unexpectedly fallen out of the sky. In the middle of a global catastrophe, something inside him quietly came home.
Parshat Vayera is, among many other things, a tale of two towns and two radically different ways of treating strangers. It opens with Abraham sitting at the entrance of his tent "in the heat of the day" (Gen. 18:1). According to Rashi, quoting the Talmud, this was the third day after Abraham's circumcision, and God had made the day exceptionally hot so that travelers would not pass by and trouble him.
But instead of being relieved, Abraham was distressed. He wanted guests. So God sent three angels disguised as men, and the moment the 99-year-old recovering Abraham saw them, he ran to greet them and rushed to prepare a meal.
The Talmud notices something else. When the guests appeared, God was in the middle of visiting Abraham, and Abraham effectively asked Him to wait: "My Lord, if I have found favor in Your eyes, please do not pass on from Your servant" (Gen. 18:3). From this, Rav derives one of the most astonishing statements in rabbinic literature: גדולה הכנסת אורחים מהקבלת פני שכינה — "Hospitality toward guests is greater than receiving the Divine Presence" (Shabbat 127a).
Abraham kept God waiting so he could look after three dusty strangers. Then, one chapter later, the Torah takes us to Sodom. The Talmud paints a portrait of the city that is all the more chilling because beneath the grotesque details its philosophy sounds almost reasonable.
The people of Sodom lived amid extraordinary abundance and asked themselves: why should travelers come here and consume what belongs to us? Why should outsiders benefit from our prosperity? So they determined to make hospitality disappear from their culture (Sanhedrin 109a).
And they did. A poor man arriving in Sodom would be given a coin by every resident, each donor marking his own coin — but nobody would sell him bread. When he eventually starved, everyone reclaimed his coin.
Visitors were offered a special bed: if they were too tall, they were cut down to size; if too short, they were stretched. And when a young woman was caught secretly feeding a poor person, the townspeople smeared her with honey and left her to be stung to death by bees. Her cry, says the Talmud, rose to heaven and sealed Sodom's fate (Sanhedrin 109a–b).
The prophet Ezekiel summed up the city's sin in one sentence: "She and her daughters had pride, plenty of bread and untroubled tranquility, yet she did not support the poor and the needy" (Ezek. 16:49). Sodom was not poor. On the contrary, it was rich. But fear of losing what it had made its people unwilling to help anyone who might need a share of it.
And what is most unsettling is how ordinary the Sodom mindset can sound at the beginning. Pirkei Avot describes the person who says, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours." First it calls this the ordinary position. Then it adds, chillingly: "Some say this is the character trait of Sodom" (Avot 5:10).
That qualification is precisely the point. Sodom did not begin with torture beds and starving beggars. It began with an entirely respectable proposition about ownership: I will not take yours, and you should not expect mine. The cruelty came later.
Which is why what happened in Gander that week was so extraordinary. Of course there were discussions and logistics to work through. But there appears to have been remarkably little debate over the fundamental moral question: Are these strangers our problem? The answer was simply yes.
And as the days unfolded, the generosity only grew. Rabbi Sudak's rescheduled flight home turned out to be on Shabbat, leaving him facing Rosh Hashanah in Newfoundland. So after Shabbat, Eithne Smith and her husband Carl drove him and two other observant passengers several hundred miles to catch a flight to New York. Rabbi Sudak walked into his relatives' Brooklyn home seven minutes before candlelighting on Erev Rosh Hashanah.
He never forgot what the Smiths had done. Years later, Eithne and Carl were guests of honor at the Chabad of Edgware annual dinner. And that brings us to one final piece of the story.
The Talmud records that Ben Zoma used to say: "What does a good guest say? 'How much trouble my host went to for me! How much meat he brought me, how much wine, how much bread — and all the trouble he took, he took only for me.'"
The bad guest says the opposite: "What trouble did he go to? I ate only one piece of bread, one piece of meat, and drank one cup of wine. Whatever trouble he took, he took for his wife and children" (Berakhot 58a).
As it turns out, hospitality has two halves. Abraham and Gander teach us how to be good hosts. Ben Zoma reminds us that there is also an art to being a good guest: recognizing generosity for what it is, understanding the effort and sacrifice behind it, and never treating what has been freely offered as though it was simply owed.
"Why am I here?" Rabbi Sudak kept asking himself. Perhaps the answer was simply to witness what happens when ordinary people decide that the stranger at the door is not a burden but an opportunity — and when the stranger understands what a gift it is to have that door opened.
Abraham taught that lesson almost four thousand years ago, sitting at the entrance of his tent in the blazing heat, desperately hoping someone would pass by. Gander remembered it on September 11, 2001 — on the very day the world forgot everything else.