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As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful 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 fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right 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 deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and love was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the light and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of profound beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other now more than ever.

The comfort of community – 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 society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.