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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and terror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in our potential for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, 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 bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), 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 quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so disgustingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, answers 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 grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and loss we require each other 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 portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.