Something important happened at Bondi Beach — not only because of the horror inflicted there, but because of how a few ordinary people responded when violence arrived.

The brutality of the Sydney massacre was shocking. But so were the choices made in those first moments.

Boris Gurman, a 69-year-old Jewish man, recognized the danger and moved toward it.

Boris attempted to disarm one of the attackers before the massacre fully unfolded. His wife followed him. Both were killed. They were days away from celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary.

It matters that Boris acted first — before the attack fully erupted, before others even grasped what was coming. This was not reactive heroism but anticipatory courage: the willingness to absorb risk in order to spare others from it.

In a media environment quick to universalize violence and hesitant to dwell on Jewish agency, that distinction should not be lost. Boris Gurman did not merely die in a terror attack; he tried to stop one. Jews know this pattern well — not because we seek heroism, but because history has repeatedly demanded it.

Later, Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Syrian-Australian bystander, confronted another attacker and physically disarmed him, saving countless lives. He survived, but was badly injured.

In the days that followed, Jews around the world donated generously to support his recovery, not out of sentimentality or symbolism, but recognition. They understood what he had done.

Neither man acted for attention. Neither was performing ideology. They did not pause to calculate outcomes or identities. They acted because innocent people were in danger. What they embodied is something our culture struggles to name but desperately needs: sacred masculinity.

For more than a decade, masculinity has been discussed almost exclusively as a problem to be managed. The language of toxicity has flattened male strength into caricature — aggression without restraint, power without purpose. Some of that critique is warranted. But the deeper failure of our moment has been to treat masculinity itself as suspect, something to be wiped out rather than formed.

The result has not been a more peaceful society. It has been a more confused one.

The opposite of toxic masculinity is not passivity or withdrawal. It is strength bound to responsibility — physical courage governed by moral restraint, a willingness to act not for dominance or glory, but for protection and care. Judaism has always understood this distinction. Its tradition does not celebrate brute force but gevurah: disciplined strength, directed outward, tethered to obligation. Its heroes are not conquerors intoxicated by power, but men who stand when others cannot — Abraham arguing for justice, Moses confronting tyranny, the Maccabees defending religious life against annihilation.

Boris Gurman stood squarely in that lineage. What defined his final act was not fearlessness but readiness — readiness to step forward when retreat would have been easier, readiness to bear cost for the sake of others. That is what sacred masculinity looks like when stripped of abstraction.

Ahmed al-Ahmed’s courage underscores another truth our culture often forgets: sacred masculinity is not tribal. It is moral. When he confronted the attacker, he did not act as a representative of a group. He acted as a man who understood that strength exists for defense.

Both men acted according to the same moral grammar, though at different moments and with different costs: when evil appears, strength is not optional. It has a purpose.

History offers a clear lesson. Communities endure not because they suppress masculine strength, but because they bind it to love, obligation, and moral limits. When men understand that their lives are bound up with others — with families, neighbors, and communities — they rise. When they are taught only suspicion or indulgence, they fracture.

We have seen this repeatedly since October 7. In Israel, men have acted not out of rage, but out of covenant — fathers shielding children, civilians confronting terrorists, ordinary people making unbearable choices to save others. One father famously threw himself on a grenade to protect his sons. His act was not impulsive. It was sacrificial. Love, quite literally, carved in fire.

Bondi Beach belongs in that same moral universe.

We should resist the temptation to romanticize death or mythologize heroism. Boris Gurman did not seek martyrdom. Ahmed al-Ahmed did not aspire to sainthood. But neither should we reduce their actions to fleeting news items or moral curiosities. What they demonstrated is something our culture urgently needs to recover: the idea that strength is for service, that courage is moral before it is physical, and that masculinity, rightly ordered, is not a liability but a civilizational asset.

In a healthier society, we would know how to speak about this without embarrassment or apology. We would teach our sons that masculinity is not about domination but guardianship, not about volume but resolve, not about asserting the self but standing for others. Sacred masculinity is not nostalgic. It is necessary.

Boris Gurman and Ahmed al-Ahmed did not defeat evil. But they confronted it. And in doing so, they reminded us of something we are in danger of forgetting: that civilization depends, in no small part, on people willing to use their strength in the service of others.

The world is not short on power. It is short on men prepared to stand when standing is costly.

At Bondi Beach, we saw what that looks like.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.