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As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed 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 government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

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

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

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and love was the message of belief.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape responded so disgustingly swiftly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the harmful message of disunity from longstanding agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many 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 significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, outrage, sadness, confusion and grief we require each other 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 indicators are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.