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While Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to describe the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

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

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a time of targeted violence.

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

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from veteran fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear azure skies above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We long right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in politics and the community will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.