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As the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a moment 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 experienced the animosity and fear of faith-based targeting on this land or anywhere else.

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

This is a period when I lament not having a greater faith. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Togetherness, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

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 true. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this city of immense beauty, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

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

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

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

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