While the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.
It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.
Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.
Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against genocide.
If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.
And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.
This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in our capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.
And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.
When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.
In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.
Togetherness, light and love was the essence of belief.
‘Our shared community spaces may not appear quite the same again.’
And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.
Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.
Witness the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.
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 questions.
Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?
How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its potential actors.
In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.
We long right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or the natural world.
This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.
But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, anger, sadness, confusion and loss we require each other now more than ever.
The comfort of community – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.
But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.
A tech enthusiast and gaming aficionado with over a decade of experience in digital media and content creation.
