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As the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial shock, grief and terror is shifting to fury and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in our potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound examples of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and love was the message of belief.

‘Our public places may not look quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, blame and accusation.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the harmful message of division from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we require each other now more than ever.

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

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