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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and blistering 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 oversimplification to describe the national temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and tolerance – of bringing together 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 hope.

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and shore, the ocean 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 obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or nature.

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 times of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

The comfort of community – the binding force 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, enervating summer.