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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

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

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial shock, grief and horror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight 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 deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I lament, because believing in people – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and love was the message of faith.

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

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

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need each other now 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 indicators are that cohesion in politics and society will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.