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As Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

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

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous 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 particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in our capacity for kindness – 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 goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural unity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

Consistent with the symbolism of Hanukah (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Unity, light and love was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians gravitated straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Witness the dangerous rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of societal discord, exploiting the attack before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly insufficient security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and consistently alerted of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were treated to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, both things are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of fear, anger, melancholy, confusion and loss we require 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 cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.