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As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and terror is shifting to fury and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official 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 mankind is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

‘Our public places may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly swiftly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

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

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.