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While the nation settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

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

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, grief and terror is shifting to fury and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

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

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

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre 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 mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these times of fear, outrage, melancholy, confusion and grief we require each other more than ever.

The comfort 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 unity in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.