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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

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 mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial shock, sorrow and terror is segueing to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, 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 unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

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

Unity, hope and love was the essence of belief.

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

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

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

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

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 protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

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

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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

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

The reassurance 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 cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.