The Immediate Impact and Terror of the Bondi Attack Is Giving Way to Rage and Division. It Is Imperative We Seek Out the Light.

As Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, sorrow and terror is segueing to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances 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 humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. 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 anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

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

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible actors.

In this city of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation 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 counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, anger, sadness, confusion and grief we need each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this extended, draining summer.