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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 soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but especially 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 often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has failed us so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

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. Emergency personnel – police officers 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 imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping 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 compassion was the essence of belief.

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

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

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful message of division from veteran agitators of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, importantly, explanations 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 woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or nature.

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

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

The comfort 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 public life and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.