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While the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat set to the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like none before.

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

Across 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 shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

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

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly swiftly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the light and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

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

In this metropolis of profound 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 multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other more than ever.

The comfort of community – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.