🔗 Share this article

While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of initial shock, grief and terror is segueing to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding 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 humanity – in our potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light and love was the message of belief.

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

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

Some politicians moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

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 insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this long, enervating summer.