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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, sorrow and horror 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 sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, 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 bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and love was the essence of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly swiftly with division, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, anger, sadness, bewilderment and grief we need each other more than ever.

The comfort of community – 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 society will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.