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

As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, grief and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight 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 humanity is so deeply diminished. 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 anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

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

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly swiftly with division, blame and recrimination.

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

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

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.