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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the harmful message of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we need each other more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.