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As the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi 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 tenor of immediate surprise, grief and horror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

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

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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 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 public life and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.