🔗 Share this article

While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of faith-based persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of faith.

‘Our public places may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this city of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment 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 indicators are that cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.