🔗 Share this article

While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of initial shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

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

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

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in our potential for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so disgustingly swiftly with division, blame and accusation.

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

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture 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 against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, sadness, confusion and grief we need each other more than ever.

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

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