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While the nation winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer mood feels, unfortunately, like none before.

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

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tenor of initial shock, grief and terror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against antisemitism with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

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

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s capacity for compassion – has let us down so acutely. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – police officers and medical staff, those who ran towards the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of social, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (light amid gloom), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and love was the message of belief.

‘Our public places may not look quite the same again.’

And yet segments of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a calculating chance to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful message of division from longstanding fomenters of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the threat of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not guns that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential 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 seem entirely familiar again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these days of anxiety, anger, melancholy, confusion and grief we require each other now more than ever.

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that unity in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.