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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic 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 tone of initial surprise, grief and horror is segueing to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and ethnic unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces 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 gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a daunting 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 official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

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

The comfort of community – 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 society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.