🔗 Share this article

While the nation settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

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

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of initial shock, sorrow and horror is segueing to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced 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 banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – 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 examples of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

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

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to question 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 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 mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

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

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.