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While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like none before.

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

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

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of belief.

‘Our public places may not look quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures 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 light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, 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 sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.