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While the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer mood feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective temperament after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tenor of initial shock, sorrow and horror is segueing to fury and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing 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 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 animosity and fear of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep churning out at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a period when I lament not having a greater spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in our potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme instances of human decency. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and cultural solidarity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a call of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and compassion was the message of belief.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity reacted so nauseatingly swiftly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was still active.

Politics has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully insufficient security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and consistently warned of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Naturally, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep guns away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above sea and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of beauty in art or nature.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these times of fear, outrage, 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 likely need most.

But tragically, all of the indicators are that unity in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, draining summer.