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As Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood seems, sadly, like no other.

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

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or anywhere else.

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

This is a period when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to aid others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by religious figures. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of Hanukah (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so disgustingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and looking for the light and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

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

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its possible perpetrators.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of clear azure skies above sea and shore, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, 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 anxiety, anger, melancholy, confusion and loss we need each other now more than ever.

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this long, draining summer.