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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial shock, grief and terror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling 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 national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in people – in our potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, 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 – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

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

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and love was the message of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so disgustingly swiftly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Observe the harmful message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly 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 threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, anger, sadness, confusion and loss we require each other more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.