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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and horror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

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

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because believing in people – in our potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

Some politicians moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, 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 inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of fear, outrage, sadness, confusion and loss we need each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.