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While the nation settles into for a customary Christmas holiday across languorous days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the background of Test cricket and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to describe the national disposition after the antisemitic violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of simple ennui.

Across the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of Australian cities – a tone of immediate shock, grief and horror is shifting to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the frequently expressed concerns of the Jewish community are now highly attuned. Similarly, they are sensitive to balancing the need for a far more urgent, vigorous official crackdown against antisemitism with the right to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our belief in mankind is so sorely diminished. This is especially so for those of us lucky never to have endured the hatred and fear of religious and ethnic targeting on this land or elsewhere.

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

This is a time when I lament not having a stronger spiritual belief. I mourn, because believing in humanity – in mankind’s potential for compassion – has let us down so painfully. A different source, a greater power, is needed.

And yet from the horror of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. First responders – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the danger to aid fellow humans, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unsung.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the necessity of social, religious and ethnic unity was laudably promoted by religious figures. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than splitting apart in a time of antisemitic slaughter.

In keeping with the symbolism of Hanukah (light amid darkness), there was so much fitting evocation of the need for hope.

Togetherness, light and compassion was the essence of faith.

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

And yet segments of the Australian polity responded so nauseatingly quickly with fragmentation, blame and recrimination.

Some elected officials moved straight for the darkness, using the atrocity as a calculating opportunity to challenge Australia’s migration rules.

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, exploiting the attack before the site was even cold. Then consider the words of leadership aspirants while the investigation was still active.

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

Like why, when the national terrorism threat level was assessed as likely, did such a large open-air Hanukah celebration go ahead with such a grossly inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the residence when the security agency has so openly and repeatedly alerted of the threat of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were subjected to that cliched argument (or versions of it) that it’s people not guns that cause death. Naturally, both things are valid. It’s feasible to simultaneously seek new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent guns away from its potential actors.

In this metropolis of profound beauty, of clear azure skies above ocean and sand, the water and the beaches – our shared community spaces – may not seem quite the same again to the multitude who’ve noted that iconic Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene bloodshed.

We long 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 counterintuitively against instinct. For in these days of anxiety, anger, sadness, bewilderment and loss we need each other now more than ever.

The comfort of community – the binding force of the unity in the very word – is what we probably need most.

But sadly, all of the portents are that unity in public life and society will be elusive this extended, enervating summer.