🔗 Share this article

While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, grief and terror is segueing to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. 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 publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the harmful message of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we require each other 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 indicators are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.