🔗 Share this article

As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is segueing to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in our potential for kindness – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so disgustingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

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

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

The comfort of togetherness – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in politics and society will be elusive this extended, draining summer.