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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi 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 tone of immediate surprise, grief and terror is segueing to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear exactly as they did again.’

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

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the harmful message of division from veteran fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear azure skies above sea and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we need each other more than ever.

The reassurance of community – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we likely need most.

But tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.