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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations 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 shock, sorrow and terror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

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

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in humanity – in our potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into 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, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

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

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

But tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this long, enervating summer.