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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the essence of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration 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 alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or nature.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we need each other more than ever.

The comfort 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 unity in politics and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.