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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom 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 especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so acutely. A different source, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, 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 community, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the message of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

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 times of fear, outrage, sadness, confusion and grief we need each other more than ever.

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

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