The Immediate Shock and Fear of the Bondi Shooting Is Giving Way to Anger and Discord. It Is Imperative We Seek Out the Hope.

As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is segueing to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight 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 deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances 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 having faith in people – in our capacity for compassion – has let us down so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient 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 targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many 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 aesthetics in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of fear, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we require each other more than ever.

The reassurance of community – the human glue 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 hard to find this extended, draining summer.