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

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. 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 unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic unity 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 meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the dangerous message of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

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

The comfort of togetherness – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.