🔗 Share this article

While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

‘Our public places may not look quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the light and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above sea and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, sadness, confusion and loss we require each other now more than ever.

The comfort of community – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this extended, draining summer.