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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere 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 shock, grief and horror is segueing to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official 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 especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

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

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion and grief we require each other 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 portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.