🔗 Share this article

While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and horror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time 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 experienced the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

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

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, 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, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of division from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly 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 quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

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

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in politics and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.