🔗 Share this article

While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right 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 endured the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light and compassion was the message of faith.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion and grief we need each other now more than ever.

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

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