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As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. 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 mass atrocities.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive stances but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in our capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a message of love and acceptance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, light and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

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

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

But tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and society will be elusive this long, enervating summer.