Hey there and welcome back to Take One, the podcast that brings you just one right thinking page of Talmud each day.

And I mean that, quite literally,

because today's daf, Menachat 10, opens with a great question that is likely to upset about

9 to 12% of the population, a question about right-handed versus left-handed people.

The Mishnah kicks things off by telling us that if the

Kohen or the priest took a fistful of the meal offering with his left hand rather than with his right

and placed it on the altar, that offering invalid. Diving into a host of complicated halakhic

questions, Rava, delivers a clarification.

When the Torah, he explains, says hand, it means the right hand.

Similarly, foot means the right foot, and ear means, well, you get the point.

A total and absolute preference for righties.

Which, if you dive into it a little,

is kind of a thing in Judaism. In Tractate's Sennedrin, for example, the sages taught us thusly.

Always have the left hand drive sinners away and the right draw them near. The left hand then is perceived as the one representing

dean or justice. The right one, not coincidentally, our stronger one, represents mercy,

compassion, forgiveness. This is why chasidim, for example, always buttoned their upper garments

from right to left, so that symbolically

they should be reminded that mercy should always quell demands for justice and retribution.

Why, then, you may ask, do most of us put our tofillin on our left arm and not the right?

For one thing, because it's supposed to be directly across

our hearts, which are on the left, but the rabbis explained there's symbolism there too.

When we put on to fill in, they argued, we stand in front of Hashem. And when you stand in front

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