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While Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere seems, unfortunately, like none before.

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

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial shock, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and deep polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official fight against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

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

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but no sense at all of that profound fragility.

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

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a moment of targeted violence.

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

Unity, light and love was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

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

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the light and, importantly, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, both things are true. It’s feasible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above sea and sand, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we need each other now more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.