🔗 Share this article

While the nation settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the national temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack 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 tone of immediate shock, grief and terror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in our potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. A different source, something higher, is needed.

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

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from longstanding agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of profound beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

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

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we require each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.