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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate shock, grief and horror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, 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 genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic targeting 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 stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in people – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

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

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful message of division from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together 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 judged as likely, did such a significant public 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 security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of fear, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we need each other more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – 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 politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.