The Midrash asks, “If a person has no daat, how can he pray?” In other words, how can we petition God for anything if we don’t deeply realize what it is that we truly want? When we ask for daat, we are asking for the ability to know what to ask. Without the power of daat—knowing what we want—we cannot powerfully articulate our desires and be truly receptive to having them fulfilled. It is not enough to have an idea about what we want, and it is surely insufficient to simply read the request as stated in the Amidah. We must deeply realize, and connect to, what we are requesting. It is meaningless to daily recite, for instance, the request for the ingathering of the Jewish people if we don’t really want to return to the Land of Israel. Have we contemplated the two thousand years of exile? Have we envisioned the joy of returning back to our land, affirming our independence and fulfilling our national and universal destiny? Has our will for our national redemption reached the level of daat? One Friday afternoon when I was on the way to the synagogue, I met an old high school buddy, Sheldon. It was the first time we had seen each other in years. During my high school days I did not live a Torah-centered life, so he was very surprised to see me all dressed up for Shabbat, with a kippah on my head, tzitzit hanging out of my pants and a siddur in my hand. “Oh, no!” he said. “You didn’t get ‘Ortho-ed,’ did you?” “Hi, Sheldon,” I said. “How are you?” “You became an Ortho Jew?” he repeated. Apparently, this notion was hard for him to handle. “Well, Sheldon, I don’t like labels.” He said, “I can prove to you that everything in that book you’re holding is a lie.” “Sheldon, cool it,” I retorted. “This is my siddur.” “No,” he repeated. “It’s a lie.” “Why is it a lie?” I asked. “For instance,” he explained, “you Orthodox Jews pray everyday to return to the Land of Israel, so why don’t you just get on a plane and go?” “That is a good question,” I admitted. “But why are you asking me? I live in Israel!” No, the prayer book is not a lie. But, as this experience taught me, perhaps what is a lie is the way we pray. If we are able but not willing to answer our own prayers, how can we expect God to take us seriously? Understandably it is not easy for everyone to just pack up and move to Israel. But if we are praying that our people return to Israel, at least we should feel saddened that all of us are not there yet. A friend of mine who was visiting Los Angeles was speaking to a religious woman living there. She was raving about a new glatt kosher restaurant that had just opened up and bragging about a shopping mall with glatt kosher this and glatt kosher that. My friend said to her, “You seem very happy here.” “We are very happy here,” she said. “But you seem very, very happy here,” he clarified. “Quite frankly,” she said, “I hope that when the Mashiach comes, he will let us stay.” Clearly, there is something wrong with this woman’s prayers if she daily asks of God to return the Jewish people to Israel. How can we pray if we don’t intimately connect with what we are asking for, if our requests are not real to us, if we have not come to realize our true will and desire? How can we pray if we don’t have daat? Prayer is an exercise to help us get in touch with what is worth wanting, so that we can really want it. Therefore, our first request is for daat. Because without daat, there is no meaning to our tefillah. We have to intimately connect with what we are requesting. We have to know what we are asking for, not voice empty words. Daat is the power to deeply realize that “this is what I want.” We ask God to bless us with this clarity and conviction. Otherwise, how can God give us the blessings He has in store for us if we really do not want them nor truly anticipate the joy they will bring us and the world. God can shower us with blessings, but if we don’t acknowledge them and truly desire them, we will not succeed in receiving them.