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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, grief and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism 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 humanity is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

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

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in our potential for kindness – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

‘Our public places may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants 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 scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

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

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need 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 tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, draining summer.