Most late Sunday afternoons, I do a double yoga class. Regulars call it “church”, our Sunday ritual. The second class is basically lying down, and if you don’t leave high on Zen and vibes, you haven’t done it right.
Leaving on Sunday, I started walking to my sister’s house. It was the first night of Hanukah, the Jewish festival of lights, and we were going to celebrate with family and friends. I’m non-practising in a religious sense, but I love a good cultural ritual, especially one involving doughnuts and fried potatoes.
I had barely walked 100 metres when I heard a barrage of bangs, and people started running and yelling.
“There’s a shooter!”
“Run! There’s a shooter.”
My yoga studio is opposite Bondi Pavilion.
I started running back, hoping someone was still there. Falling and skidding across the building’s courtyard, a woman helped me up, and we ran together. Knocking on church’s door, I announced my name, and an angel hurried us in. Apparently, yoga teachers remain calm and comforting in crisis.
There were others there too, wide-eyed and ashen-faced. There were women from yoga, women not from yoga, a mother and her teens, four food app delivery drivers and a young man with a toddler whose wife was locked in the supermarket below the studio – a motley and terror-struck crew.
“This doesn’t happen here,” the woman who helped me when I fell kept saying through panicking breaths, her American accent barely audible.
There’s no phone reception in the yoga studio, which isn’t a problem until you’re hiding from shooters. We took turns calling loved ones from the one corner where a few shaky bars graced our screens. My sister picked up. My 15-year-old niece was missing.
She had gone to the beach with friends and wasn’t answering her phone. None of them were. I tried to go out and look for her, but the whole building was locked down, forcing me back into the studio. It was the single most terrifying moment of my life.
For a few hours, we waited, trying to leave when there was a lull in the symphony of sirens, only to be commanded back inside. Some lived just blocks away, desperate to go home. Others had wives in supermarkets and toddlers who needed their mamas. I wish I’d gotten more of their names.
Before the coast was deemed clear, I learned two things.
The good news is my niece and her friends were safe, barefoot in swimmers in a locked-down cafe, their phones abandoned on the sand as they ran from the water.
The bad news is my community is not.
Shaking in a yoga studio, I imagined whoever was out there could be targeting us – Jews are to Bondi as fish are to, well, Bondi – but remembering the Westfield Bondi Junction stabbing rampage last year that turned out to have a different, still unclear, motive, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.
“They’re saying it was a Jewish party,” said a woman crouching in our reception corner.
Did you know you can actually feel your brain rupture the moment your world explodes?
After approximately one million years, the fortress reopened, my cousin came to get me and we were reunited at my sister’s house. My niece was still barefoot in swimmers, her trademark teenage nonchalance on full display, her inevitable trauma not yet stinging. I hugged her tight. When my sister embraced me, I burst into tears, unaware I’d been holding them in.
Several hours after sunset, the traditional time for such things, we lit Hanukah candles and said prayers. We sat around the dinner table with friends and extended family as news came in about the wounded, the dead, the shooters and the mensches. We watched reels on repeat of Ahmed al-Ahmed, the undisputed MVP and a national hero, disarming one of the shooters with his bare, now legendary hands. My niece found footage of herself on TikTok.
We talked, we cried, we had panic attacks in the bathroom. Lucky to be safe, to be together, to be whole.
As I write, 15 victims are confirmed dead, among them a 10-year-old child, a Holocaust survivor and two rabbis. Many more are wounded, some critically, and our entire community is distraught, but not surprised.
We knew there was an inevitability to this, a historical context for this, but our warnings of such fell on deaf ears. For two years, we’ve often been dismissed, mocked and gaslighted for alleging precisely this would happen. I invite everyone to sit in that discomfort.
The horrors of Gaza are not undermined by acknowledging our humanity and right to life. The unconscionable death toll there is not diminished by expressing empathy for our dead and mourning here. It’s actually absurdly easy to hold space for everyone, everywhere, all at once.
The story of Hanukah is one of hatred and destruction, but ultimately one of survival and hope. Thousands of years after its literary debut, it is also now about doughnuts and fried potatoes, which I vaguely understand and do not care to question.
Hanukah posits that a candle lit in a ransacked temple with only a day’s supply of oil burned bright for eight days straight. While basic maths, ardent secularity and my fancy oil burner indicate this is improbable at best, I choose to embrace the miracle on this one.
I need to believe in hope.
On Monday, I held my niece’s hand at the site of the massacre, where people sang in Hebrew and flowers covered the ground. Looking back at my yoga studio, mere metres away, I couldn’t reconcile what had happened, how close we had been.
Trauma literacy, life experience, and the annals of time say it will take a long time for everybody affected to process and heal, from survivors to first responders and everyone in between.
I’m just grateful for my niece. And church.
Happy Hanukah, namaste and Amen.
