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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and love 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 nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

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

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly 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 danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

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

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.