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As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi 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 tenor of initial surprise, grief and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

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 far more urgent, vigorous 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 especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our potential for kindness – has failed us so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

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

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of profound beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or nature.

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, 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 likely need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and the community will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.