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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced 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 banal instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has failed us so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and cultural unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving 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 event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

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