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While Australia settles into for a traditional 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 atmosphere seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is segueing to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a cynical chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful message of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear azure skies above sea and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve observed 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 beauty in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, anger, sadness, confusion and loss we need each other more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – 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 society will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.