🔗 Share this article

As the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, sorrow and terror is segueing to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight 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 belief in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and love was the message of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a cynical opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the harmful message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration 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 openly and repeatedly warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear azure skies above sea and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, melancholy, confusion and loss we need each other more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.