Let’s now look at the continuation of the request: “...and may we be sated by Your goodness.” It is not food that sates us; it is the recognition that food is God’s gift that does it. Think about the difference between your mother’s homemade soup and soup from a can. The love and care you taste in your mother’s soup nourishes more than just your body; it nourishes your soul. Here, we are asking God to bless this year and its produce so that we can fully recognize that it all comes only from God and taste in it His Divine Presence. Only this satisfies the soul. It’s important to understand that we are not simply asking for rain, fruits and vegetables. We want God’s goodness to become manifest in the fruit and vegetables and thus truly satisfy us. We want to remember that it is God’s presence in the apple—not the apple itself—that will fulfill us. For this reason, the Kabbalah teaches that if we eat without first reciting the appropriate brachah, the food will nurture only our body but not our soul. Likewise, if we don’t recite the appropriate brachah after we eat the food, the energy in the food will not go to our soul; the energy will go only to our body. As we pray that God bless this year with prosperity, we also ask that we should not get confused and think that it is the prosperity that is satiating us but rather God’s goodness. In essence, we are saying, “It is the taste of Your goodness, God, that is coming through this food, and this is what I want to be satiating me.” Think back to the manna that God gave to the Jewish people during their forty years in the desert. The manna did not look nourishing, yet it fully satisfied the Jews’ bodies and souls. If the manna had looked like food, then the people would have thought that the nourishment came from the food rather than from God. Imagine that every day bagels would fall from the sky, perfectly cut in the center, with a thick spread of cream cheese and a wad of lox. Now that would have been a Jewish experience! But, of course, it would not have delivered the message. Nourishment comes only from God, in whatever form He chooses. If God had wanted pens to nourish us, then He would have made pens nourishing. With the manna, God was teaching us that it is not by food alone that we live, but rather by what comes from the word of God. Therefore, in asking for prosperity we qualify our request so that the prosperity does not lead us astray. We beseech God to enable us to truly experience, taste and be sated by only His goodness, which is manifest in the prosperity. In this way our national return to the land will truly be part of our return to God.