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As the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official 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 belief in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive stances but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of division from veteran fomenters 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 still active.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and seeking the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean 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 horrific violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

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

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.