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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and love was the essence of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures 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 frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for understanding and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and loss we require each other more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.