Hey there, and welcome back to Take One, the podcast that brings you just one,

complete page of Talmud each day.

And on today's duff, Menachot 16, the rabbis

ask an interesting question. We've learned before that meal offerings are basically a one-two

punch. The Kohaneem or priests can only eat them after both the comets or the fistful of flour

and the levona or frankinc, are placed on the altar.

Which leads us to our interesting question today.

Suppose, the rabbis ask, that a priest is having an inappropriate thought about eating the meal

offering, meaning planning to eat it when it is forbidden to do so.

Is the offering immediately disqualified, even if it happened,

when sacrificing just one of these elements, but not both? The rabbis argue that the offering

becomes pigul, or abominable, forbidden, only if the inappropriate thought occurred,

while sacrificing both the comets and the Levona.

But Rabim Eir disagrees arguing that having an inappropriate thought during either one of those stages

is enough to make the whole offering disqualified.

It's a very complex halakhic question, one whose intricate implications are beyond the scope of this here humble podcast.

But it seems to me that this question can serve as a microcosm for the entire Talmudic way of thinking.

Ordinarily in life, we rush to get to the bottom line as fast as we can.

We want answers. Is X permitted or is it forbidden? Is Y good or is it bad? We think this way because ours is a culture gripped by terms

like ROI or return on the investment and addicted to metrics of all sorts. We don't care too much

about how we get from point A to point B as

long as we can achieve the desirable outcome. But on today's stuff, the rabbis are teaching us a different

...