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As Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians 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 tenor of initial shock, grief and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky 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 inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

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

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Witness the harmful message of division from longstanding 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 still active.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear azure skies above sea and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for understanding and significance, 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 seem more in order.

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

The reassurance of community – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.