🔗 Share this article

While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting 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 reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, 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 bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic unity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of division from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

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

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

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

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.