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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, grief and terror is segueing to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official fight against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or elsewhere.

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

This is a period when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in our potential for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

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

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

Witness the dangerous message of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

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

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

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

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

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