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While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, grief and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in our potential for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, 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. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning 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 message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.