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As the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, grief and horror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity 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 unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

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

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

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the probe was still active.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and grief we require each other more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.