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While Australia winds down for a customary Christmas holiday across slow-moving days of beach and blistering heat set to the soundtrack of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like no other.

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

Throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in Sydney – the most postcard picturesque of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and terror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, vigorous government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to demonstrate against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so deeply depleted. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have endured the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this land or anywhere else.

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

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I lament, because having faith in humanity – in mankind’s potential for kindness – has let us down so acutely. Something else, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such profound instances of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The bravery of those present. First responders – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the gunfire to help others, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still waved in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of community, faith-based and cultural solidarity was laudably promoted by faith leaders. It was a message of love and acceptance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of targeted violence.

In keeping with the meaning of the Festival of Lights (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and compassion was the message of faith.

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

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

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

Observe the harmful rhetoric of disunity from veteran agitators of societal discord, capitalizing on the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the probe was ongoing.

Government has a formidable task to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and scared and seeking the hope and, not least, answers to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as probable, did such a significant open-air Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the alleged killers have six guns in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that cause death. Of course, each point are valid. It’s possible to at the same time seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and keep guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of immense beauty, of pristine azure skies above ocean and shore, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that famous Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s obscene violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for family, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in culture or nature.

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

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, melancholy, confusion and grief we need each other 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 cohesion in public life and the community will be elusive this extended, draining summer.