Speech transcript: "A letter to Bondi"
Delivered at Bondi Pavilion on 14/6/26, 6 months since the massacre.
I felt daunted and privileged to have been asked to write and read aloud a ‘letter to Bondi’, alongside six other Australian writers, at an event curated by Adam Van Rooijen and Michaela Kalowski for Shalom Collective Sunday evening.
The event marks 6 months since the Bondi Massacre.
A letter to Bondi
Language doesn’t just describe reality. It creates it.
It’s not just what we say that produces tomorrow’s conditions. It’s what we condone. Perhaps more so, it’s what we don’t say.
Like no other people, Jews have experienced the power of language across millennia to spread light in history’s darkest chapters, and its power to darken the corners of every century.
It is through language that we have preserved what it is to be a Jew, just as it is through language that others have taken elements of what we are, century after century, and sullied those elements.
We are, among other things, the longest argument in human history. A people that kept itself alive not with territory, for most of our story, and not with armies, but with sentences, carried on pages and in mouths to outlast empires.
We pour our language, our “what was”, and our “what will be”, like liquid light from the warm palms of one generation into the palms of the next.
We make vows. We write laws. We accept, without thinking twice, that certain words spoken in a certain order on a certain day reach forward and shape a future that hasn’t happened yet. We cast spells and call them contracts.
Language is the one technology we trust to bind tomorrow.
Consider what we are doing when we light the Hanukkiah.
On the twenty-fifth of Kislev, we tell a story about one night’s worth of oil that burned for eight.
We don’t keep that story in a museum. We keep it in our mouths.
On its surface, Chanukkah is a story about a military victory, a small band of Maccabbees reclaiming a desecrated temple from an empire that had tried to legislate us out of existence.
But that is not the part we kept.
We kept the oil.
We kept the smallest detail in the whole account: that there was barely enough light to begin with, and it lasted anyway.
Of all the things to carry for two thousand years, we chose to memorise the refusal to go dark.
Did those men understand the narrative they painted themselves into? Their intrusion into a story already being told about the futility of their hate against us?
And what of the weeks after?
Those who must not be named took to their keyboards and watercolours to poison those who carried our story down to the beach on that day.
We have a duty to name those who spread the light at Bondi—those whose capacity to spread light through our community changed my life forever.
Chabad. Those infectiously enthusiastic Jews; those relentlessly welcoming friends to all.Those who knew better than to expect tzadakkah from me, handing me a coin out the front of Elsternwick Coles so that I could perform the mitzvah.
I am not a Chabadnik. I am Chabadnik parasitic.
Chabad run my local shule and make walking between the graffiti and the bigotry lining King Street bearable.
In 2018, I wandered into a Jews in recovery meeting at Chabad Malvern.
I’d kept my Jewishness at arm’s length for a decade, but fear of relapse had me following a 12-step program to a tee.
Christians told me to find my people, and Chabad was there, waiting to give reprobates like myself an opportunity to start again.
In 2024, I moved back to Sydney. I live close to Newtown Shule. Rabbi Eli and the Rebbetzin Elke, and their far too many children warming Georgina Street and Hollis Park.
Chabad or not, organised or hopelessly disorganised, it is our shared language that has our people lighting candles on the beach.
We are standing proof of language’s capacity to build.
So let us build further.
On 25 Kislev 2025, Jews with outstretched hands were mowed down by fundamentalists.
We stood in our living room and lit the Hanukkiah, our phones burning holes in our pockets.
My pregnant sister had called from Bondi.
I gave a friend a lift home.
He didn’t want to be seen carrying a Hanukkiah.
Bondi,
I want you to know what we did about it.
I want to open a window into our home on the other side of town, 24 hours after.
It was 25 Kislev, 164 BCE, when Judah Maccabee and his followers reclaimed Jerusalem and the Second Temple from their conquerors.
Two thousand years since the Maccabean revolt, a chain stretches from ancient Jerusalem to Bondi Beach to our living room in Newtown.
Through pogroms, conquests, and the Holocaust, language binds us to the commemoration of a light that punched above its weight.
Language is breathed into bones from one generation to the next, warm with ancient purpose, bright as a burning bush.
My partner calls out from downstairs.
“Candles!”
I haven’t slept a wink.
My body does exactly what her words tell it to do without thinking.
Fifteen members of our family have been stolen from us. I close my eyes and all I see is the face of a little girl. He name was Matilda, may her memory be a blessing. May her memory be us. May we be custodians of tomorrow.
We light two candles, because it is written, in the order we ought to, because it is written, and I hold her, because of what we have written.
We are the same people.
We are writing the future we speak; and perhaps more so when we don’t.
Hope is all that we have.
Those who followed their feet here tonight, you are hope.
Those with one eye on yesterday, one eye on today, and a heart set on tomorrow: we are hope.
My grief is profound and unexceptional. I am a writer and I am a Jew. I am language looking for cracks in rocks to fill just right.
I must make the way I speak of Bondi mean more than the coalescence of salt water; cheek-streaked, parsley-soaked; shifting the sands of time.
I published an essay speaking to similar themes 30 days after Bondi. I submitted versions tailored to the demands of every publication imaginable — as I do with almost all my work.
It found a home here:
Antizionism killed Bondi Jews.
This piece was published in The Australian 17/12/2025. It was subsequently cut out and glued to Greens MPs offices without my knowledge.
Well done, Joshua. Thank you for all you're doing.
Your name-drop of Elsternwick Coles reminds me... we used to shop there when I lived in Elwood as a teenager, in the late 1990s. So often, the checkout operator we got (no self checkouts then!) was an elderly Jewish man. He was always so gentle and courteous with every customer, saying "For you, my friend!" as he handed us our bags of groceries. I never knew his name, but my dad called him "The Greeter", and perhaps that's how everyone knew him. It was one of many regular reminders to me of how lovely the Melbourne Jewish community was. I always felt blessed to live among them.
That dear man was old enough that he was most likely a Holocaust survivor, or definitely must have lost family in the Shoah even if he himself escaped it. He's almost certainly passed away by now, nearly 30 years later, but his memory is a blessing even to a gentile like me who barely knew him.
Times have changed hugely and horribly since then, but even from the other side of the world now, I am still standing with Jews in Australia and everywhere, against this senseless hatred and evil that CANNOT have the final word.
So beautiful.