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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to help fellow humans, 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 ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Witness 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 investigation was ongoing.

Government has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean 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 horrific violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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

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

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

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