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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous government and institutional crackdown 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 mankind is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, religious and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for lightness.

Unity, hope and love was the essence of faith.

‘Our public places may not appear exactly as they did again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of pristine azure skies above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more in order.

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

The reassurance 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 public life and the community will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.