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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of coast and scorching heat set to the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer mood feels, sadly, like no other.

It would be a significant oversimplification to describe the national disposition after the anti-Jewish terrorist attack on Jewish Australians during the beachside Hanukah festivities as one of simple discontent.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tenor of initial surprise, sorrow and horror is shifting to fury and bitter polarization.

Those who had previously missed the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now highly attuned. Just as, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional crackdown against anti-Jewish hatred 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 mankind is so sorely diminished. This is particularly so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of faith-based targeting on this land or elsewhere.

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

This is a period when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because having faith in people – in our capacity for compassion – has failed us so painfully. Something else, a greater power, is required.

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have seen such extreme examples of human goodness. The heroism of individuals. The selflessness of bystanders. First responders – police officers and medical staff, those who charged into the gunfire to help fellow humans, some recognised but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the police tape still waved 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 compassion and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

Consistent with the meaning of Hanukah (illumination amid gloom), there was so much fitting reference of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the message of faith.

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

And yet elements of the political landscape reacted so nauseatingly quickly with division, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the pessimism, using tragedy as a cynical opportunity to question Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the harmful message of division from veteran fomenters of societal discord, capitalizing on the massacre before the crime scene was even cold. Then read the statements of political figures while the probe was still active.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is mourning and scared and looking for the light and, importantly, explanations to so many uncertainties.

Like why, when the official terror alert was judged as probable, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate security presence? Like how could the accused attackers have six guns in the residence when the domestic intelligence organisation has so openly and consistently alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How quickly we were treated to that tired line (or versions of it) that it’s individuals not weapons that cause death. Of course, both things are valid. It’s possible to simultaneously pursue new ways to stop violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its potential perpetrators.

In this city of immense splendor, of clear blue heavens above ocean and sand, the ocean and the coastline – our communal areas – may not look entirely familiar again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so jarringly out of place with last weekend’s horrific violence.

We yearn right now for understanding and meaning, for loved ones, and perhaps for the consolation of aesthetics in art or the natural world.

This weekend many Australians are cancelling Christmas party plans. Reflective solitude will feel more in order.

But this is perhaps counterintuitively counterintuitive. For in these times of anxiety, anger, melancholy, bewilderment and grief we require each other now more than ever.

The reassurance of togetherness – 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 society will be hard to find this extended, draining summer.