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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate shock, grief and terror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based 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, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, hope and love was the essence of faith.

‘Our public places may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly swiftly with division, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension 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. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of fear, anger, melancholy, confusion 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 sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be elusive this long, draining summer.