🔗 Share this article

As the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and love was the message of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look quite the same again.’

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, anger, sadness, confusion and loss we require each other 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 indicators are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.