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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like no other.

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

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, 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 genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.

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

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, hope 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 reacted so disgustingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous message of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or nature.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these times of fear, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need each other now more than ever.

The comfort of togetherness – the binding force 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, enervating summer.