🔗 Share this article

As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the national temperament 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 tenor of immediate surprise, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, 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 faith-based persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and accusation.

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things 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 perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, anger, sadness, 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 likely need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.