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While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the national disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, grief and terror is shifting to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I regret not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because believing in people – in our potential for kindness – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such profound examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and cultural solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of belief.

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

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

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so openly and consistently warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or nature.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, bewilderment and loss we require each other more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – 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 society will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.