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As Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Throughout 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 terror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive stances but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and love was the essence of belief.

‘Our public places may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of fear, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.