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While the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the collective temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

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

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

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear blue heavens 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 incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this long, enervating summer.