Acorn Woodpecker : Cached Prayers

This is an Acorn Woodpecker. I have a particular fondness for woodpeckers and could have marveled at him all day. He’s the first one I’ve encountered, and I was in a new park, a place I had driven several hundred miles to be. My trip was about expectations, and they were handsomely rewarded. Savor not just the bird himself, but be certain to notice how he’s using the telephone pole. Rather than extracting bugs or sap, this woodpecker stores acorns - hundreds of them - in little cavities that he creates. He clearly has both a sense of time and a strategy for addressing it. Food is stored for his anticipated future.

The Western Wall, the Kotel, is the holiest site in Jewish Jerusalem. Tradition teaches that the Divine Presence resides here, and there is a palpably different feeling as one approaches the Wall. Visitors place small notes in the Wall’s crevices. These are often petitions to HaShem asking for health, prosperity, love, or children. These pleas, small paper slips, stand in stark contrast to the massive solidity of the stone blocks. Both the practice and the sight are profoundly moving. One can almost feel the updraft as people’s most-heartfelt prayers are lifted, elevated by the ambient holiness. Each prayer asks for a brighter future.

We are now beginning a new secular year. Beginnings can be times of both optimism and anxiety, filled with questions about what the year will bring. I would offer confidence and expectation for this new year. When we offer prayers of petition - at the Wall or in our homes - we presuppose that we will be here to experience the results of HaShem’s beneficence. Such prayers necessarily reflect a timeline traveling into the future. Slips of paper can be as strong as blocks of stone; whispered hopes can rise higher than towering walls. The Woodpecker’s cached hopes mirror our own prayerful actions. May we all be rewarded with the strengths to address our needs.