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While the nation settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

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

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly swiftly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the hope and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above sea and sand, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – 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 significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss 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 probably need most.

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