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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 country’s summer mood seems, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Australian Jews during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

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

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are attuned to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a moment for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely depleted. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the hatred and dread of religious and ethnic persecution on this land or elsewhere.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive stances but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a time when I lament not having a greater faith. I mourn, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s 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 heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the police tape still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of social, faith-based and cultural unity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

Consistent with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Unity, light and compassion was the message of belief.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so disgustingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and accusation.

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a daunting job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the hope and, importantly, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was judged as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly insufficient protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the danger of antisemitic violence?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of profound beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem 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 family, and perhaps for the solace of aesthetics in culture or the natural world.

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

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

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

But tragically, all of the portents are that cohesion in politics and the community will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.