🔗 Share this article

As the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national disposition 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 tone of initial shock, grief and horror is shifting to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

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

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. 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 the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the message of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look exactly as they did again.’

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

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

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion and grief we require each other now more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.