🔗 Share this article

While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and horror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, 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 animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive stances but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound 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 gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and love was the essence of faith.

‘Our public places may not look exactly as they did again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from veteran agitators of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear 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 noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

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

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, draining summer.