🔗 Share this article

While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the national disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and horror is segueing to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official fight 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 sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation 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 division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns 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 iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in politics and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.