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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 insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple 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 shock, grief and terror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional crackdown 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 faith in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the message of belief.

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

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

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the harmful message of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics 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 uncertainties.

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 insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns 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 potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or nature.

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

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

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in politics and the community will be elusive this long, enervating summer.