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While the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and love was the message of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the light and, importantly, explanations 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 security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn 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 counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of fear, outrage, melancholy, confusion and grief we need each other now more than ever.

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

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