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As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial surprise, grief and terror is segueing to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

‘Our public places may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

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

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

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, answers 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 insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – 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 counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we need each other more than ever.

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

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