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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat set to the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the national disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate shock, grief and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official fight against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

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

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

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful message of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics 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 probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or nature.

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

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

The reassurance of community – the human glue 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 society will be elusive this long, draining summer.