It was the Saturday after — the first Shabbat service in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh tragedy was about to begin.
Sunmeet Singh Sethi and I entered the local synagogue here in Newark, Delaware. Rabbi Jacob Lieberman, a short, handsome man wearing a kippah, like many others in the congregation, stepped off the dais to welcome us.
After returning to the lectern, the rabbi’s hands rose repeatedly to clean his cheeks. Then he left.
I noticed other congregants turning their necks to look at us with grace and kindness. He reentered after a couple of minutes and looked at us and others. He was still crying.
Growing up in Punjab and studying and working in India, America to me, and those around me, was a mecca of creative and constructive activities — a land of opportunities. No wonder, then, that an army havaldar’s son could dare think of starting a software company immediately after landing here in 1999.
Related: Pittsburgh shooting is a blow against the very soul of America
That company, Tekstrom, will celebrate its 20th birthday next May.
Even the sky wasn’t the limit in America, or so we all believed. Americans had literally proven it by landing on the moon a year before I was born.
The assembly line, harnessing the atom, developing the computer and creating the cyber age — America had revolutionized the world on many fronts.
For someone who dreamed of coming to this country, and worked hard to make it happen, it has been especially painful to witness the hatred expressed by a tiny, but lethal, group of individuals in this country.
Six years ago, it struck a gurdwara in Oak Creek. Recently, a synagogue in Pittsburgh. In between, a black church in Charleston.
All three tragedies were perpetrated by lone white supremacists; all three at places of God; all three at an interval of three years.
In each case, the perpetrators’ numbers rose: six victims the first time; nine the second; and 11 in Pittsburgh. And, then there were the additional tragedies in schools across the country, the concert in Las Vegas, the nightclub in Florida, among others.
Sunmeet and I were at Temple Beth El to express our love and solidarity with the Jewish community. We were there to share their unspeakable grief that resulted from the unconscionable desecration that occurred the preceding Saturday.
The sinking feeling I had after hearing about the Oak Creek shooting is still fresh with me. I was in Bangalore that day visiting my India operations with my wife and two children. Renu and I were worried especially about our son. He was then, and even today, the lone Sikh boy with long hair to ever attend his private school in its century-old history.
Every Saturday he has a private lesson with his violin teacher at her house, a place my family knows well from the many Passover dinners we’ve enjoyed there. That day I dropped my son off for his Saturday lesson and went to the gym.
It was there, on the wall-mounted TV-screens, that I learned of the tragic Pittsburgh shooting. It triggered that familiar sinking feeling once again. I thought of my Jewish friends and their pain and anguish.
The next day I joined hundreds of others gathered at a vigil on the steps of Memorial Hall at the University of Delaware in Newark. We had assembled to express our solid rejection of the anti-Semitic hatred that infected the shooter who wanted to “kill all Jews.”
Addressing the gathering, which included representatives of many faiths, Rabbi Lieberman had this to say: “For our grief, this is an opportunity to mourn. For our outrage, it’s a time to cry out. For our fear, an opportunity to pray and to invite courage, and for our vulnerability, it’s a time to stand with others and to discover that we are not really alone.”
Others spoke as well. “Today, we are not Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Muslim [or] Hindu,” U.S. Senator Tom Carper said. “Today, we are all Jewish.”
Delaware Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester, Gov. John Carney and many others who spoke mentioned virtually all religions except Sikhism. It was only U.S. Senator Chris Coons who reminded the crowd of the shooting at the gurdwara in Wisconsin.
I’m sure the officials’ omission was not intentional; we are a tiny demographic in America compared to other religions, but passing Sikh Awareness Month resolutions (April) in the Delaware legislature that I started in 2017 must go on for many more years, I resolved.
When Sunmeet and I walked to the parking lot that Saturday after the Shabbat service, a woman stopped her car near us. She was in tears. She blew kisses at us while saying, “Thank you for coming!” Sunmeet later told me that two of her loved ones were among the eleven victims in Pittsburgh.
A reminder of how far we all need to go to expand our understanding came when a couple of Sikhs questioned me for going to the Shabbat service, just as many Sikhs and others ask me every year why I host Iftar dinner during Ramadan. Others question my celebrating Christmas, Diwali, Lohri, Holi, Passover and other festivals.
“Why not?” I reply.
“You are a Sikh.”
“Precisely. I only feel Sikh when I am doing this because my Nanak’s blessing of ‘Sarbat Da Bhala’ hugs me warmly and blissfully only during such moments.”
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This column was published online by the www.delawareonline.com on Nov 9, 2018.
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