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As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood seems, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic 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 Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the right 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 sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

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

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government 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, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed 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 security agency has so publicly and consistently warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering 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 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 unity in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.