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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, grief and horror is segueing to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and love was the message of belief.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape responded so disgustingly swiftly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – 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 violence.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of fear, anger, melancholy, bewilderment 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 probably need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.