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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a dramatic oversimplification to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and bitter division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic official crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a moment for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based targeting 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, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in our potential 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 profound instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and ethnic solidarity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and acceptance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not appear quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and accusation.

Some elected officials gravitated straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical chance to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the harmful message of disunity from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope 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 event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the solace of beauty 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 times of anxiety, outrage, sadness, bewilderment and grief we need each other more than ever.

The comfort of togetherness – 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, draining summer.