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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, 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 violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate shock, grief and terror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right 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 particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

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

Observe the dangerous message of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

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

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed 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 solace of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and grief 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 likely need most.

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.