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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in mankind is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this continent or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in our potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time 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 love was the message of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements 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 seeking the light and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Of course, each point are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this city of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these times of anxiety, outrage, sadness, confusion and grief we require each other more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the indicators are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, draining summer.