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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere 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, grief and terror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and fear of faith-based 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, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light 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 division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other now 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 portents are that unity in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, draining summer.