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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and blistering heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate shock, grief and terror is segueing to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other now 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 unity in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.