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While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to 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 describe the national temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

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

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, light and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

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

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we require each other more than ever.

The comfort of community – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But tragically, all of the indicators are that cohesion in politics and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.