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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish 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 postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and horror is shifting to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

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

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

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, 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 community, religious and cultural unity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the message of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look exactly as they did again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape responded so disgustingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Witness the dangerous message of division from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements 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 frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, confusion and grief we need each other more than ever.

The reassurance of community – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, draining summer.