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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, grief and horror is shifting to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and love was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the probe was still active.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we require each other now more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.