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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, grief and horror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – 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 seen such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered 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 love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of division from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

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

The reassurance of togetherness – 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 public life and the community will be elusive this long, enervating summer.