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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the national temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

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

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed 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 solace of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss 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 likely need most.

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, draining summer.