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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving 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 no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the collective temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous message of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the light and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, anger, melancholy, confusion and grief we require 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 portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.