🔗 Share this article

While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, grief and terror is segueing to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in our potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic unity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? 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 danger of targeted attacks?

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 true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the ocean and the beaches – 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 horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other now 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 indicators are that cohesion in politics and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.