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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred 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, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in our potential for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed 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 religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

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

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

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

Witness the harmful message of division from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the light and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the ocean and the coastline – 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 understanding and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and grief we require each other now more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.