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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the national disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and horror is segueing to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in our capacity for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound 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 others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its potential actors.

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

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion 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 likely need most.

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in public life and the community will be hard to find this long, draining summer.