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As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the national temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love 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 darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens 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 incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, anger, sadness, confusion and grief we require each other now more than ever.

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

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