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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the collective temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of initial shock, grief and terror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and fear of faith-based persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

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

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

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a message of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and love was the message of belief.

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

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

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

Observe the harmful message of disunity from longstanding agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above sea and sand, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we require each other more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in politics and society will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.