🔗 Share this article

As the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

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

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial shock, grief and horror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or nature.

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

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

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

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