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

While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and terror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

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 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 deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in our capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

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

Witness the harmful message of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other now more than ever.

The comfort 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 unity in public life and the community will be hard to find this long, draining summer.