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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

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

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest 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 particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – in our potential for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

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

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

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we require each other now 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 indicators are that unity in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.