🔗 Share this article

While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic unity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of belief.

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

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

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

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

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn 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 cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of fear, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we require each other more than ever.

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

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