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

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

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

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

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

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

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

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

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

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be elusive this long, enervating summer.