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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of belief.

‘Our public places may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly swiftly with division, blame and recrimination.

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

Witness the harmful message of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the light and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully 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 antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in public life and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.