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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, 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 moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and dread of faith-based targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in our capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and cultural unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

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

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

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared 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 large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

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

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, outrage, sadness, confusion and loss we require each other more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in politics and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.