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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like none before.

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

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

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

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

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 compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we require 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 tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, draining summer.