🔗 Share this article

While the nation settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations 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 shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

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

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

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound examples of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (light amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

‘Our public places may not appear exactly as they did again.’

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

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this city of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, anger, melancholy, confusion and grief we require each other now more than ever.

The reassurance 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 politics and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.