🔗 Share this article

As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and horror is shifting to anger 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 attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – in our capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen 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 anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from veteran 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 still active.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

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

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

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

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