🔗 Share this article

As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like no other.

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

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

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional fight 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 mankind is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference 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 segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, blame and accusation.

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

Observe the harmful message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the site 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 mourning and frightened and seeking the light and, not least, 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 insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we require each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.