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

And today's stuff, Menachot 11, is all about

the ways of the hand. By now, we know enough about this sacrifice we've been studying

for these past few days, the one involving flour oil frankincense combo, to know that one of its

key moments is the Kamehasa, or when the Kohen takes a fistful of the mixture

and places it in a klisharet or a sacred temple vessel as preparation for offering it on the altar.

Cool, cool, cool.

But on today's page, we learned that Kemitza, while simple sounding enough to us moderns, millennia removed from

temple life, was actually one of the most intricate, complicated, and downright difficult,

services a priest could perform. Why? Well, the rabbis explained by arguing, no surprises there,

about just how the Kameitsa had to be performed.

Rava suggested it was no biggie.

Just grab a handful of the meal offering, as you would say, popcorn from Hattelbert the movies.

But the other rabbis seem to disagree.

The service, Rav teaches, had to be performed in a particularly dexterous way,

with the three middle fingers grabbing the offering and the thumb and the pinky brushing off

the excess mixture. Try to imagine the move, grabbing, say, a fistful of sand by essentially

using only your three middle fingers, and you will see that

it is enormously difficult to pull off just right, especially if you're a priest, the offering is

meant for the altar, and every drop counts. So not surprisingly, the more we read about manual

dexterity, and the comitza is a test of nothing, but the more we realize,

the strong and surprising pawns between the ways of the hand and the ways of the mind.

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