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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

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

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and horror is segueing to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing 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.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful message of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of immense splendor, of clear azure skies above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and loss 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 tragically, all of the portents are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this long, enervating summer.