🔗 Share this article

As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and horror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to aid 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 social, religious and cultural unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look quite the same again.’

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

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

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

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in politics and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.