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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and horror 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 sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in our potential for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and accusation.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, sadness, confusion and grief we require each other now more than ever.

The comfort of togetherness – the binding force 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 elusive this extended, draining summer.