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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat set to the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

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

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

Witness the dangerous message of division from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear azure skies above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, anger, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other more than ever.

The comfort 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 politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.