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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and love was the message of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need each other now more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.