The Immediate Impact and Terror of the Bondi Attack Is Transitioning to Rage and Discord. We Must Look For the Light.

As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and blistering heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of faith.

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers 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 tired line (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

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

The reassurance of togetherness – 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.