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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering 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 significant understatement to describe the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere 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 anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned 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 countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in people – in our capacity for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, light and compassion was the message of belief.

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

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

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

Observe the harmful message of disunity from veteran fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers 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 woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly 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 individuals not guns that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – 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 obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we need each other now more than ever.

The comfort of togetherness – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, draining summer.