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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the right 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 depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, light and compassion was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous message of division from longstanding agitators of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of clear azure skies above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of fear, outrage, sadness, confusion and grief we require each other more than ever.

The reassurance 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 unity in politics and society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.