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As Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

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 discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of initial shock, grief and horror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

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

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and cultural unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

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

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures 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 hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

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

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – the binding force 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.