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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official fight against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, light and compassion was the essence of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some politicians moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this city of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

The comfort of community – 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 politics and society will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.