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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

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

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

This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our potential for kindness – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment 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 sadly, all of the portents are that unity in public life and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.