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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during languorous days of coast and blistering heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like none before.

It would be a significant oversimplification to characterize the national disposition after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere discontent.

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of initial surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to reconciling the need for a much more immediate, vigorous official crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred 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 mankind is so deeply diminished. This is particularly so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity 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 hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing stances but no sense at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a greater spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in people – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has failed us so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have seen such profound instances 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 danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part anonymous and unsung.

When the police tape still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was admirably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Togetherness, light and love was the message of belief.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look exactly as they did again.’

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded 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 challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from veteran agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

Politics has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and frightened and looking for the light and, not least, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant public Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the residence when the security agency has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to stop violent bigotry and keep firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine blue heavens above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for family, and perhaps for the solace of beauty in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are calling off Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will seem more appropriate.

But this is perhaps somewhat counterintuitive. For in these days of fear, outrage, melancholy, confusion and loss we require each other more than ever.

The comfort of togetherness – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we likely 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.