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As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the national temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of immediate surprise, grief and horror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in our potential for compassion – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples 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 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 necessity of social, religious and ethnic unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

‘Our public places may not look quite the same again.’

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

Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

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

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and society will be elusive this extended, draining summer.