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As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like no other.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and terror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and compassion was the message of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look quite the same again.’

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

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

Observe the dangerous message of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as probable, did such a significant public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

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

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above sea and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

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

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, anger, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.