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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the country’s summer atmosphere seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the collective temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah celebrations as one of simple 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 previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our belief in humanity is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that profound fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because believing in people – in our potential for kindness – has let us down so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such extreme instances of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to help others, some recognised but for the most part anonymous and unheralded.

When the police tape still fluttered wildly all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably promoted by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of unifying rather than splitting apart in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, hope and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

And yet elements of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly swiftly with fragmentation, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Witness the dangerous message of division from longstanding fomenters of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to uniting a nation that is mourning and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a large public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have multiple firearms in the family home when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How quickly we were subjected to that tired argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of immense splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and sand, the water and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific bloodshed.

We long right now for understanding and meaning, 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 feel more in order.

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

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

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in politics and the community will be hard to find this long, enervating summer.