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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed 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 solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear exactly as they did 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 the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – 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 violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

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

The reassurance 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 public life and society will be elusive this extended, draining summer.