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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official fight against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and compassion was the message of belief.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty 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 times of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we need each other now more than ever.

The comfort of togetherness – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.