My first book, A Light Still Burns: Israel and the Values Worth Defending, was written in response to the barbarity of 7 October 2023. It looked outward. It asked what Israel was facing, what Israel was defending, and why the struggle of the Jewish state could not honestly be separated from the broader struggle of the democratic West.
But there is a limit to how long any society can speak about danger as though it belongs somewhere else.
There comes a point when the lens must turn inward.
That is the animating purpose of When Our Light Is Tested: The Bondi Massacre and the Choices Ahead. This is not simply a sequel. It is a reckoning.
The Warning Signs We Chose to Ignore
For years, the warning signs were visible. Antisemitism did not remain confined to history books or fringe movements. It seeped into mainstream discourse, public institutions, universities, parts of the media, and everyday conversation across Western democracies. The shocking thing was not that hatred still existed. History gives us no such luxury. The shocking thing was how quickly permission was granted in societies that pride themselves on tolerance, reason, and decency.
Then, on a summer evening in Australia in December 2025, on the first night of Chanukah, the illusion collapsed.
The Bondi Beach massacre was not merely an attack on Jewish Australians. It was a revelation. It showed what happens when incendiary rhetoric is normalised, when incompatible ideologies are indulged, and when fashionable moral posturing displaces seriousness. What had for too long been excused in protest culture became mass murder at one of Australia’s national icons, as families gathered to celebrate light.
That moment did not emerge from nowhere. It followed years of warning signs absorbed without consequence. It followed the steady corrosion of moral clarity. In that sense, Bondi was not an aberration. It was a test. And it revealed far more than the intentions of the murderers. It revealed the weakness, confusion, and complacency of the society around them.
Civilisations Decline Before They Fall
The four quotations placed near the front of When Our Light Is Tested frame the book’s central argument. Arnold Toynbee warned that civilisations die more often by suicide than by murder. Will Durant observed that a civilisation is not conquered from without until it has first destroyed itself from within. G. K. Chesterton reminds us that a person’s view of the universe is the most practical thing about them, because what we believe about truth, meaning, and obligation shapes everything else. And Václav Havel adds the most unsettling note of all: that the great tragedy of modern man is not simply that he understands less about the meaning of life, but that meaning itself matters less to him.
Together, these are not ornamental quotations. They are warning lights.
They describe the conditions under which societies drift before they fracture: self-harm, internal decay, confusion about reality, and moral indifference. None arrives all at once. They accumulate quietly: a little more indulgence here, a little less confidence there, a reluctance to speak plainly, a growing habit of treating moral clarity as crude and moral confusion as sophistication.
That is how decline advances in healthy-looking societies.
Why Antisemitism Matters to Everyone
This is what gives When Our Light Is Tested its purpose beyond commentary. It is not simply a book about one event, one community, or one political dispute. It is a forensic examination of how antisemitism, moral evasion, and institutional failure culminated in the Bondi massacre—and what that moment reveals about the choices now facing Australia and the democratic West. It draws on survivor testimony, lived experience, historical perspective, and cultural analysis to show how societies drift before they fracture, and how failures of leadership allow violence to follow when warnings are ignored.
That matters because antisemitism is never only about Jews.
It is a warning sign. It tells us that deeper moral and institutional weaknesses are already at work. It shows that a society’s immune system is faltering. If lies about Jews can be normalised, other lies will follow. If violence against Jews can be contextualised or excused, other violence will be too. If the public square becomes too timid to defend one vulnerable minority, it will not somehow become stronger when the threat broadens.
A Book Designed to Influence, Not Perform
This is why the book is written with a wide audience in mind. Yes, it will resonate with readers already alert to these dangers. But it is also intended as a practical tool—something to be passed quietly to thoughtful friends, colleagues, family members, and people on the periphery who are receptive but not yet fully engaged. People who may sense that something is wrong, but who have struggled to find the language, confidence, or framework to push back. People who may have been misled by the ABC and other failing media institutions that too often blur, distort, or obscure rather than clarify.
In that sense, this is not a book for slogans. It is a book for influence.
It is written for the friend who is uneasy but still persuadable. For the colleague who has absorbed misinformation but remains open to evidence. For the citizen of goodwill who has been hoodwinked by fashionable lies and moral theatre, yet has not entirely surrendered their instincts. It is also written for the person who has moved away from faith, and who may now sense that something essential has been lost: moral confidence, spiritual grounding, and the language to distinguish clearly between good and evil.
Chapter 10 of When Our Light Is Tested is titled “A God-Sized Hole in the Heart,” and it speaks directly to that condition. When faith recedes, the space it once occupied does not remain empty. Something else enters the vessel. We have seen what can fill that vacuum in the past, and we are seeing it again now: ideologies of grievance, moral confusion, radical falsehoods, and movements untethered from truth, humility, and restraint. If Australia, and our civilisation more broadly, is to recover its moral confidence and clarity, then we must exercise agency. We must do what we can to return to the Judeo-Christian faith and inheritance that helped form our civilisation and gave us the language to distinguish truth from lies, good from evil, and freedom from tyranny.
From Small Conversations to Cultural Renewal
It begins in small conversations. In the refusal to let euphemism stand where truth is needed. In the willingness to challenge lies rather than politely absorb them. In giving thoughtful people something solid, serious, and accessible that they can read, reflect on, and then pass on.
From drops come ripples. From ripples, waves.
That line matters because it captures how change really happens. Not all at once. Not merely through grand gestures. But by equipping people of goodwill to exercise principled agency when passivity is no longer neutral.
Our Light Is Being Tested
The good news is that fragility is not extinction. A society can be weakened without being lost. Damage is not the same as doom. But repair requires honesty, courage, and a willingness to abandon the comforting fiction that these problems will resolve themselves if we simply avert our eyes and lower our voices.
If A Light Still Burns argued that some values are worth defending, When Our Light Is Tested confronts the harder reality that those same values, left unattended, can be lost.
That is why this book is offered not as performance or posture, but as a call to action from a soldier who refused to look away as hatred came home.
When Our Light Is Tested is available globally from Amazon in paperback, audiobook, and eBook.
Our light is being tested. We have a choice: tend the light as though our descendants’ future depends upon it—or endure the consequences of its loss.
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