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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations 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 tenor of initial surprise, grief and horror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in people – in our potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

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 – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the light and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these times of fear, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we require each other now more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.