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As Australia settles into for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the collective temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple ennui.

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

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

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

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

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

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

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

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are true. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, 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 feel more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss we need each other more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.