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As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

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 terrifying fragility.

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

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and ethnic unity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and love was the essence of belief.

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

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

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

Observe the harmful message of division from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we require each other more than ever.

The comfort of community – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.