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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of belief.

‘Our public places may not look exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful message of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we require each other more than ever.

The reassurance of community – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.