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As Australia settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of coast and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of Test cricket and cicada song, this year the country’s summer atmosphere feels, sadly, like no other.

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

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate surprise, sorrow and horror is segueing to anger and bitter division.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced fears of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a much more immediate, energetic official fight against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against genocide.

If ever there was a time for a countrywide dialogue, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us fortunate enough never to have experienced the animosity and dread of faith-based persecution on this continent or elsewhere.

And yet the social media feeds keep spewing at us the trite hot takes of those with blistering, polarizing views but little understanding at all of that terrifying fragility.

This is a time when I regret not having a stronger faith. I lament, because having faith in people – in our capacity for kindness – has failed us so painfully. Something else, something higher, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human goodness. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – law enforcement and paramedics, those who ran towards the danger to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

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

In keeping with the symbolism of the Festival of Lights (illumination amid gloom), there was so much appropriate reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, hope and love was the essence of faith.

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

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

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

Witness the harmful rhetoric of division from longstanding agitators of societal discord, exploiting the massacre before the site was even cold. Then read the words 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 frightened and seeking the light and, not least, answers to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as likely, did such a significant open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a woefully inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the family home when the security agency has so openly and consistently alerted of the danger of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that cliched line (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, both things are true. It’s possible to simultaneously seek new ways to stop hate-fuelled violence and keep firearms away from its possible actors.

In this metropolis of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the many who’ve observed that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We yearn right now for comprehension and significance, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or nature.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling holiday gathering plans. Quiet contemplation will seem more in order.

But this is perhaps somewhat against instinct. For in these days of fear, outrage, 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 long, enervating summer.