The previous blessing of the Amidah was a prayer for knowledge. With that knowledge comes an important awareness: we have drifted away from the Torah of our Father in heaven.
Without such awareness, spiritual growth is impossible. Why, after all, should I grow/change/repent if I am contentedly living in harmony and compliance with G-d’s Torah? What would I repent for?
Such thinking is not just counterproductive. It is delusional. In fact, it is virtually idolatrous. The Torah is not The Idiot’s Guide to Jewish Morality. The complexity and depth of Torah ideas is what spawned the thousands of pages of Talmud and the millions of pages of commentary. Our knowledge of the Torah’s contents is limited. Our knowledge concerning the application of the Torah’s ideas to our own lives even more limited. And our awareness of how our lives have changed, so that what seemed like good answers before is no longer optimal, is more limited still.
What all that adds up to is that drifting away from Torah is virtually inevitable; and we are genuinely creative when it comes to finding ways to drift. Obviously, we can rebel outright—but we rarely do. Instead, we are swayed by our emotions; we convince ourselves that we already know what the Torah demands of us; we take the attractive fad of the day and imagine that since it’s so attractive to us, it must be in the Torah; or else, we simply have forgotten Torah altogether.
And on and on. The variations are endless, and over the course of our lives we will certainly make use of many of them. So the Rabbis in their wisdom arranged it in the Amidah so that the text seems to say: “You wanted knowledge. Great. Here’s the first thing you should know: You need to get back on track. Use your knowledge to turn back to your Father in heaven.
He’s waiting.