I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree,” wrote poet Joyce Kilmer. I think of that whenever I reread our opening sedra, because in Eden, God created “every tree that was lovely to the sight,” and not only that, but also every tree that was “good for food” (Genesis 2:9). By “every,” the Torah can hardly mean just those trees that had already evolved (since, as the Torah understands it, there had been no evolution yet). But like everything else in nature, trees have changed mightily through the eons and will continue to evolve for eons to come. So by “all trees,” the Torah must be including every tree from the beginning to the end of time!

Some garden! It even contained a bread tree (Ber. Rab. 15:7). On one hand, the midrashic discussion seems to imply that the bread tree was identical to the tree of good and evil, which Adam and Eve ate only in error. On the other hand, only after the expulsion were they told that they would have to work for their bread (Genesis 3:19), so they must have had some kinds of bread trees available.

In any case, we are asked to imagine that in Eden, bread grew from trees. These days, we ask rhetorically, “You think money grows on trees?” Back then, everything was free. It was as if money grew on trees, because even bread, the most basic foodstuff and the hardest to manufacture, once did grow on trees. And it will again, when the Messiah comes, and we are rewarded with Paradise revisited.

We understand better now why the blessing we say over bread (Hamotzi) praises God for “bringing forth bread from the earth.” Actually, bread does not grow out of the earth; only raw wheat does. But back in Eden, when we still did not have to work for our bread, actual bread must have come up. (Imagine a whole field of bagels!) And in Paradise to Come, the same thing will happen. So (says the Talmud, the Hamotzi refers to the bread “that God will in future bring forth from the earth.”

Whenever we sit down to a meal, we are supposed to be reminded of the messianic future, when we will not have to work for our bread because it will sprout ready-made from the earth.

Now we understand better the Birkat Hamazon (Grace After Meals). It, too, anticipates messianic times.

The Birkat Hamazon contains four ancient blessings, with some additional material added during the Middle Ages. The Talmud attributes its fourth blessing (called hatov v'hameitiv, praise of God “who is good and who does good”) to the Bar Kochba revolt, when the emperor Hadrian forbade the burial of Jewish bodies. But without burial, there can be no resurrection. So God is said to have prevented the corpses from decaying and then convinced Hadrian to permit burial after all.

That same blessing occurs elsewhere: We are to say it upon hearing “good news” (b'sorot tovot), by which is meant not just that we got a raise or even that we won the lottery. The Mishna contrasts “good news” with “bad news,” over which we praise God as “the judge of truth” (dayan ha'emet). Baruch dayan ha'emet is what we say when we hear of a death; the opposite, then, hatov v'hameitiv looks forward to the day we hear that resurrection is at hand. The Christian “Gospel” means “good news,” the same thing as our b'sorot tovot. The root meaning is Jewish: the good tidings of a messianic era.

We now understand why we end Birkat Hamazon with Psalm 37:25: “I was young and am now old and have never seen the righteous abandoned and their children seeking bread.” How dare we say such a thing! We do so only because we know that the entire meal, with bread at its center, is supposed to evoke our faith in that better time when God will again bring forth bread directly from the earth, when we will say hatov v'hameitiv because resurrection is at hand, and when we will indeed never see the righteous abandoned and their children hunting for bread.

We begin every year's reading of Torah with this remarkable promise: Eden past and another Eden in our messianic future. In the meanwhile, the righteous are sometimes abandoned, children do go hungry, and we work for bread “by the sweat of our brow.” Our parsha reminds us to do whatever we can to ameliorate those conditions and to live by the faith that some day, our progeny will awaken to the “good news” that the days of humankind's exile from Eden are over.