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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, 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 instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

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

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

Unity, light and love was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Witness the harmful message of disunity from longstanding agitators of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this extended, draining summer.