🔗 Share this article

While the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the collective temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, grief and terror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against antisemitism 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 humanity is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in our potential for compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of belief.

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

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

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

Observe the harmful message of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the hope and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

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

The reassurance of community – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, draining summer.