🔗 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 sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of initial shock, grief and horror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official fight against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so disgustingly swiftly with division, blame and accusation.

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the dangerous message of division from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly 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 possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

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 cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

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

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

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