🔗 Share this article

As Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.

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

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen 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 charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

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

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we require each other now more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.