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While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and horror is segueing to fury and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably championed 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 (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of division from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a daunting task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air 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 danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

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

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

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that unity in politics and the community will be elusive this long, draining summer.