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As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

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

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to aid fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was admirably championed 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 (light amid darkness), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

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

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

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

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

But tragically, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.