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As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, grief and horror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official fight against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind 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 persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

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

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of fear, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we require each other more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in politics and the community will be elusive this long, enervating summer.