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As Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a dramatic understatement to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tone of immediate shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

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 lucky never to have endured the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying 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 let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Unity, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

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

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

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 assessed as likely, did such a large public 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 alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of clear blue heavens above sea and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, confusion and grief we need each other more than ever.

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

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