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While Australia winds down for a traditional Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and blistering heat set to the background of sporting matches and cicada song, this year the nation's summer mood seems, unfortunately, like no other.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the collective disposition after the antisemitic terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah festivities as one of mere discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial shock, grief and terror is segueing to fury and deep polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official fight against antisemitism with the freedom to demonstrate against mass atrocities.

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 lucky never to have endured the animosity and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or anywhere else.

And yet the algorithms keep spewing at us the banal instant opinions of those with inflammatory, polarizing stances but little understanding at all of that profound vulnerability.

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such profound instances of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help 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 imperative of social, faith-based and ethnic unity was admirably championed by religious figures. It was a message of compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid darkness), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for lightness.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

‘Our shared community spaces may not look quite the same again.’

And yet elements of the political landscape responded so nauseatingly quickly with division, finger-pointing and recrimination.

Some politicians moved straight for the darkness, using tragedy as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s migration rules.

Witness the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of political figures while the investigation was still active.

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

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated 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 simultaneously pursue new ways to prevent hate-fuelled violence and prevent firearms away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine azure skies above sea and shore, the water and the coastline – our shared community spaces – may not look 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 beauty in art or the natural world.

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

But this is perhaps counterintuitively against instinct. For in these times of fear, anger, melancholy, confusion and grief we require each other more than ever.

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

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