„From the beginning of creation it was fitting that the taste of the t…”

We live in a world that has a path. In order to eat fruit, we must grow a tree, weed the grasses, and wait a long time for the fruit. The trunk is the means of reaching the fruit; it has no purpose of its own.

Rav Kook's paraphrase is on the command 'a fruit tree making fruit'—God commanded the earth to sprout a fruit tree making fruit, and the Midrashim and commentators explain that this refers to a tree whose trunk could also be eaten, along with the tree's fruit. The earth did not do so. The process, the tree itself, has no interest of its own but is only a means for the sake of future fruit.

Think about how you need to travel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv: the road to Tel Aviv is long and superfluous, and we would be happy to forgo the journey and arrive straight away, in a single moment, in Tel Aviv. All this because there is no interest in the journey—there is only the destination.

We live in a world that has a path: in order to move from place to place we must walk on foot or travel, and we do not arrive directly. In order to eat fruit we must grow a tree, weed grasses, and wait a long time for the fruit. As far as fruit is concerned, the trunk is only the means and has no purpose of its own.

In the future we will live in a world in which even the means for attaining the goal will themselves be a goal—the path will be part of the goal and not merely a means to move from place to place. Thus the taste of the tree will be like the taste of the fruit—there will be interest in the trunk just as there is interest in the tree's fruit; there will be interest in the road to Tel Aviv just as there is interest, for that person, in reaching Tel Aviv... And perhaps, perhaps we are already there...

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