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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat accompanied by the background 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 characterize the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and terror is shifting to anger and bitter polarization.

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

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – 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 appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and love was the essence of belief.

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

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

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully 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 targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies 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 noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of fear, anger, sadness, bewilderment and grief we require each other now 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 public life and the community will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.