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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial surprise, grief and horror is shifting to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is especially 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 social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible 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 noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other now 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 portents are that unity in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.