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As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the national temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians 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 Australian cities – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic unity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

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

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

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, anger, sadness, confusion and grief we need 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 indicators are that cohesion in politics and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.