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As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

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

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and horror is shifting to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

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

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, light and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

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

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this city of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

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

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we require 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 tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.