🔗 Share this article

As the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and horror is shifting to fury and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

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

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in our potential for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

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

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need 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 sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.