🔗 Share this article

As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

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

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

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 fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and love was the essence of belief.

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

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

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the harmful message of disunity from veteran agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, 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 grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need 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 public life and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.