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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the collective disposition after the antisemitic 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 tenor of immediate shock, grief and terror is shifting to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in our potential for kindness – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, 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 cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, answers to so many questions.

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 inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, 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 likely need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.