At the dark end of a brutal year, I’m grateful to these heroes for showing us the light |
Some traditions are getting harder to maintain. Among them, my own custom of devoting the last column before Christmas to reasons to be hopeful. In recent years, amid war and bloodshed, that task has been especially challenging – and this week was no exception.
It began with the news from Bondi beach, where 15 people were gunned down and dozens more injured, most of them Jews celebrating the festival of Hanukah. That came just two-and-a-half months after the deadly attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. To be a Jew at the end of 2025 is to fear that to gather together, whether at moments of joy or sorrow, is to take a mortal risk. That even to do relatively ordinary things together has become a matter of life and death.
But Hanukah is not over, and its defining theme is finding light in the darkness. And so, in that spirit, I’ll keep up my own little tradition – and, as it happens, the massacre in Sydney is the ideal place to start. For there, in the pitch black of a murder spree fuelled by hate, were multiple points of light.
The global imagination has been captured, rightly, by the heroism of Ahmed al-Ahmed, the passerby who, with no weapon of his own, tackled one of the two attackers, even wresting his gun from him. In an instant, al-Ahmed disproved the very case the gunmen were doubtless trying to make: that Muslims are somehow commanded to see Jews as their enemy, a foe to be destroyed. In an act of mind-boggling courage, he showed that the human urge to save the life of a fellow human being is more powerful.
Al-Ahmed was not the only one to feel that urge. Footage has emerged of a retired couple, Boris and Sofia Gurman, both in their 60s, making a similar move, tussling with one of the gunmen and grabbing his rifle. For a moment Boris seemed to succeed, wrestling the man to the ground. But the attacker apparently had another gun, and he used that to shoot Boris and Sofia dead.
Meanwhile, 14-year-old Chaya Dadon gave up the place of........