🔗 Share this article

While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and horror is segueing to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest 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 especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and ethnic unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

‘Our public places may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

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

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we need each other more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the indicators are that cohesion in politics and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.