🔗 Share this article

As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

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

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and love was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Observe the harmful message of disunity from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar 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 consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

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

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and the community will be hard to find this long, draining summer.