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While the nation winds down for a customary Christmas holiday during slow-moving days of beach and scorching heat accompanied by the soundtrack of sporting matches and insect sounds, this year the nation's summer atmosphere feels, unfortunately, like none before.

It would be a significant understatement to characterize the national temperament after the anti-Jewish violent assault on Jewish Australians during Bondi Hanukah celebrations as one of mere ennui.

Throughout the country, but especially than in Sydney – the most iconically beautiful of the nation's urban centers – a tone of initial shock, sorrow and horror is segueing to anger and deep division.

Those who had not picked up on the often voiced concerns of Australian Jews are now acutely aware. Similarly, they are attuned to reconciling the need for a far more urgent, energetic government and institutional fight against anti-Jewish hatred with the freedom to peacefully protest against mass atrocities.

If ever there was a time for a national listening, it is now, when our faith in humanity is so deeply 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 anywhere else.

And yet the social media feeds keep churning out at us the trite hot takes of those with inflammatory, divisive views but no sense at all of that terrifying vulnerability.

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

And yet from the atrocity of Bondi we have witnessed such extreme examples of human decency. The courageous acts of ordinary people. The bravery of those present. Emergency personnel – police officers and paramedics, those who charged into the gunfire to help others, some publicly hailed but for the most part unnamed and unheralded.

When the barrier cordon still fluttered in the wind all about Bondi, the imperative of community, religious and ethnic solidarity was laudably championed by faith leaders. It was a call of love and tolerance – of bringing together rather than dividing in a moment of antisemitic slaughter.

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

Unity, light and love was the essence of belief.

‘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, blame and recrimination.

Some politicians moved straight for the pessimism, using the atrocity as a cynical opportunity to challenge Australia’s immigration policies.

Observe the dangerous message of disunity from longstanding agitators of Australian racial division, capitalizing on the massacre before the site was even cold. Then consider the statements of leadership aspirants while the investigation was ongoing.

Government has a formidable job to do when it comes to bringing together a nation that is grieving and frightened and seeking the hope and, importantly, explanations to so many questions.

Like why, when the official terror alert was assessed as likely, did such a large public Hanukah event go ahead with such a woefully inadequate protection? Like how could the alleged killers have multiple firearms in the family home when the domestic intelligence organisation has so publicly and repeatedly warned of the danger of targeted attacks?

How rapidly we were treated to that cliched argument (or iterations of it) that it’s people not weapons that kill. Of course, each point are true. It’s feasible to at the same time pursue new ways to prevent violent bigotry and prevent firearms away from its potential actors.

In this city of profound splendor, of pristine blue heavens above ocean and shore, the ocean and the beaches – our communal areas – may not look quite the same again to the many who’ve noted that famous Bondi seems so incongruous with last weekend’s obscene violence.

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

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

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

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

But sadly, all of the indicators are that cohesion in public life and society will be hard to find this extended, enervating summer.