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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective disposition 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 tenor of immediate surprise, grief and horror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

‘Our public places may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and accusation.

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that famous 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 beauty in art or the natural world.

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

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

The reassurance of togetherness – the human glue of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.