an optomistic new year message
This year we have a bumper olive harvest – the biggest, since we planted our new grove twenty years ago. The work of picking, pruning and burning off is the most intense of the year.
The large crop feels somehow auspicious, as do the copious rains and the unusually crisp temperatures. When we first arrived on these rugged hills, some 33 years ago in 1993, we remember hearing a climate scientist assuring us that due to global warming this region of Spain would resemble the Sahara by 2003. We heard this on the BBC World Service program “Science in Action” on our short wave radio, our only form of communication back then with the outside world. Having just settled here, and having absolute faith in the reliability of the BBC you can imagine how this highly confident prediction alarmed and depressed us.
Well, since then, many things have happened, both predictable and unpredictable from the continued veridian fecundity of the Andalusian countryside, to the increasing unreliability of the once-great BBC.
New years have a funny way of making us reflect on all of these things. They are times of rejoicing but also of deep, and often sad reflection. We are reminded of those we have lost and of our own mortality and of those we love, and of those we do not – and of those who love us, and of those who do not.
All of which brings me to the Hanukkah story: The story centres around the miracle of the olive oil for the Jerusalem Temple Menorah – sufficient only for one day’s illumination, but miraculously lasting the eight days required for new oil to be made and sanctified (hence the eight stemmed candlesticks lit in the windows of most Jewish homes). As an olive farmer, whose crop is exchanged for oil, the story has become increasingly resonant and moving with each successive harvest, and never more so than this year, following the horrific events on Bondi Beach.
As many of you reading this know, I am not religious, but I am nevertheless deeply moved by the symbolism and central message of Hanukkah on a fundamental human level; that message being one of enduring light and of steadfast hope despite the worst efforts of all those who oppose our existence.
Thus, at the risk of contradicting/upsetting “omni-causers” everywhere, my predictions for 2026 and many more years to come, are repeated Andalucian olive harvests, the continued and uncowed thriving of the Jewish People, and the assured reoccurrence of the light of the Hanukkiah – itself, a metaphor for Isaiah’s famous dictum, that our credo was, is and forever will be, “as a light unto the nations “.
Happy New Year, and a hearty l’chaim!
*Isaiah 42:6. Header photo shows the large Hanukkiah (the Hanukkah candelabra) in the synagogue at my old school, Carmel College.
ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA 
It is easy to be optimistic if one just remembers how rarely long-term [and often short-term] predictions come true. Congratulations on your harvest. Congratulations on your optimistic message.
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The harvest is a mixed blessing, in that we get more oil, but it’s such an enormous amount of work. If we get half a metric tonne of olives, the press will give us our own oil back. We don’t think we’ll quite reach that mark this year.
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