Some thoughts on Bereshit:
Bereshit presents initial or defining conditions on the state of humanity and our relationship to the world and to God. The usual interpretation of events in the Garden of Eden suggests that humanity, i.e. Adam and Eve, failed a test given by God, and hence were banished from the Garden of Eden. However, I would question that view. Three key statements about the creation of man, found in Genesis I suggest to me that man was not meant to reside in the Garden of Eden. In I, 26 we read "and God said 'let us make man ...'" raising the question why the plural, who are the "us". Traditional interpretations suggest the majestic us, God speaking to the angels, or God speaking to the animals. I would suggest another possibility,if we are willing to allow that time in the Torah is not linear, i.e. that God is speaking for all time. Under these conditions the "us" raises to me another possibility, namely that the creation of mankind is a partnership between God and humanity, that the "us" is really Us, the human race, that we are to play a role in our own development and creation. Bereshit also includes explicit charges to humanity including, in 1.28 the challenge to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it..." Finally God saw that this was "very good."
How then is humanity to subdue the earth? It seems to me that there is only one viable approach --- through the scientific method based on empirical observation and experimentation. (I suppose other methods would be through magic or supernatural means, or for God to give us all the rules for subduing the earth, but these don't appear to be options for us). Hence it would seem that built into humanity is the need and ability to experiment and I would extrapolate from the need to subdue the earth to the need to subdue ourselves. We learn of the world around us through observation and our senses. We learn to subdue the world by generalizing from our observations, making predictions, testing them, compiling and remembering the results. It seems to me that this is in contrast to another path to truth, namely revelation. Hence when the details of man's creation are described, and in Genesis 2.16 God says to Adam, "thou shalt not eat of it" this is a revealed truth, but how is Adam to deal with direct revelation, and indeed does God really expect Adam to "obey"? It seems like the stage is set for a departure, for a failure of the test. We have a human with a built in need to learn through experience and to experiment, and we have a tree which by all accounts seems "good for food" and "a delight to the eyes". If this is a test, it's a test which cannot be passed since Adam at this point has no "memory" only a series of contradictory inputs. God's voice, Eves description, the Snake --- how can a human decide whom to obey, and that same human still subdue the earth? That human must, sooner or later, eat of the tree if the human is to be capable of subduing the earth --- putting it another way an obidient human who would obey God's command under the described conditions would also be incapable of subduing the earth.
According to Adin Steinsaltz (In the Beginning: Discourses of Chasidic Thought) the dichotomy between revealed truth and derived or learned truth can be likened to conception and birth, to Adam and Eve, to Chachmah and Binah, to the written and the Oral Torah. From this perspective I would conclude that Adam and Eve placed out in the world (as opposed to remaining forever static in the Garden of Eden) represent the seed for the dynamic development of humanity, a unique kind of development in which humanity seeks to achieve the proper balance between revelation and learning or memory (between schofarot and zichronot?) and humanity feeds back upon itself the results of its insights and learning both from the perspective of learning about the physical world, but also learning about the spiritual world (malchuyot?). I interpret the role of mitzvot as being the key to this development for Jews, as we gain through our actions an appreciation of the meaning of revelation.