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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

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

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran 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.

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 questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, confusion 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 likely need most.

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