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While the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations 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, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

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

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

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in people – in our potential for kindness – has let us down so painfully. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural unity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the message of belief.

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

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

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

Witness the harmful message of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, anger, melancholy, confusion and loss we need each other more than ever.

The reassurance of community – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.