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While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood seems, unfortunately, like no other.

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

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

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment 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 animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, blame and recrimination.

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

Observe the dangerous message of division from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning 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 large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential actors.

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

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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

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

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in politics and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.