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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the national temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate 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 particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, light and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the harmful message of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

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

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.