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While the nation settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the collective disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of initial shock, grief and terror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, a greater power, 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 ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (light amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the hope and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or the natural world.

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

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 comfort of togetherness – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.