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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial surprise, grief and horror is segueing to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed fears of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the trite instant opinions of those with blistering, polarizing views but no sense at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. A different source, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, 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 social, faith-based and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid gloom), there was so much appropriate 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 Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

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

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from veteran fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration 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 consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible perpetrators.

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

We yearn right now for understanding 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 feel more appropriate.

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

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in public life and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.