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As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

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, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in people – in our potential for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

‘Our public places may not look exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

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

Witness the dangerous message of division from longstanding agitators of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the hope and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible actors.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

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

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, 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 probably need most.

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in public life and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.