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As Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the collective temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official fight 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 belief in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural unity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly swiftly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we require 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 sadly, all of the portents are that unity in public life and the community will be hard to find this long, draining summer.