🔗 Share this article

As the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest 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 particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the hope 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 event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched argument (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 guns away from its potential actors.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion and grief we need each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.