🔗 Share this article

As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

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

This is a time when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

‘Our public places may not appear quite the same again.’

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

Some politicians moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of fear, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and loss 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 likely need most.

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.