Bread of Affliction

The Bread of Affliction / 11
frustrated. Eating is supposed to make you greater. Each time
you eat, a little bit is added to your awareness of Hashem. He
wants you to say these words, I thank You Hashem; baruch
Atah Hashem. If you think about what you are saying then you
are no longer the same personality. Now you deserve entirely
different treatment in the eyes of Hashem, because you’re not
the same as you were before you began eating.
This subject is of the utmost importance because one of the
fundamental purposes of life is to eat and to talk about the food.
At the beginning of the Torah, Adam was given the test of the
eitz hada’as (Tree of Knowledge). It was a test of eating; it’s not
an accident that the test was in this form. The test could have
been in the form of prohibiting Adam from looking or going
into certain places. Instead, the test was a matter of eating. Why
eating? The function of eating is one of the fundamental acts of
life. After air and water, nothing is as essential to life as food.
All of the fruits in Gan Eden were permitted to Adam except for
the eitz hada’as. When Adam viewed the luscious peiros, the
beautiful fruits hanging on the trees of Gan Eden, his first duty
was to become imbued with gratitude and love to Hashem just
because of this inestimable gift of food. His gratitude should
have kept him from doing anything which Hashem had forbidden.
The test of food was the test of gratitude. Because Adam
failed the test, he lost the great pleasure of Gan Eden – that of
pleasurable and enjoyable food. Because you didn’t utilize the
great gift of food, it was taken away from you, and from now
on you must labor. Adam’s punishment was “B’zeas apecha tochal
lechem — By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread…”
It will be difficult for you to make a living.
The lesson of bread for us, not for Adam alone, is that every
human being is obligated to the Creator for his very life. “Shekein
chovas kol hayetzurim — This is the obligation of every