Let us choose to imitate those who heal.

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In the days after the Bondi massacre, Australia found itself suspended between shock and solidarity. The beach, usually a symbol of ease, openness, and shared life, became a place marked by absence. Towels lay where people had fled. Flowers appeared where lives had been taken. Silence settled where laughter had been only hours before.

René Girard helps us see that moments like this are not only events of violence but events of imitation. Human beings, he says, are deeply mimetic: we catch one another’s desires, fears, and emotions. In crisis, this shared vulnerability can bind us together or turn us against one another.

Shared Fear, Shared Humanity

In Bondi’s aftermath, the first mimetic wave was fear, a fear that spread not because people were weak, but because they were connected. The community breathed together, grieved together, and tried to make sense of what had happened. Girard would say that this shared emotional resonance is the beginning of both danger and possibility.

The Temptation to Blame

Girard warns that when a community is shaken, it instinctively searches for someone to blame, a scapegoat who can carry the weight of collective anxiety. We are seeing hints of this in the public discourse: political figures positioning themselves as protectors, debates about extremism and identity, and the subtle pressure to locate the cause of the violence in a particular group or community.

The Bondi response also revealed something deeper: a refusal by many to let fear harden into hostility. Stories of courage, including those from people of diverse backgrounds, helped disrupt the mimetic pull toward scapegoating. The larger community is resisting the easy narrative that violence demands an enemy.

Rituals That Heal Instead of Harm

Girard believed that communities heal through rituals that restore unity without sacrificing someone. In Bondi, these rituals emerged almost immediately:

• candlelit vigils
• paddle‑outs forming circles of solidarity
• moments of silence on the sand
• symbols of remembrance carried gently by strangers
• the many who joined the Hanukkah tradition of progressive candle-lighting

These were not acts of forgetting but acts of re‑membering — stitching the community back together through shared presence rather than shared blame.

Choosing the Non‑Violent Path

Girard often said that modern societies stand at a crossroads after violence. One path repeats the ancient pattern: fear, rivalry, scapegoating, and renewed division. The other path is harder: it requires truth, compassion, and the courage to resist mimetic hostility.

In Bondi’s aftermath, we saw a community leaning toward the second path when people chose to honour the victims, uplift the helpers, and hold space for grief without turning it into fuel for exclusion. They chose to imitate the courage of those who ran toward danger, not the violence of those who caused it.

A Community Becoming Itself Again

Girard reminds us that crises reveal who we are becoming. Bondi’s response – tender, courageous, imperfect, but deeply human – promises a community that refuses to let violence define its story. Instead, it leans to imitating the best of itself.

And perhaps that is the deepest Girardian insight here:
we are always imitating someone; so let us choose to imitate those who heal.

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