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

fragrant page of Talmud each day.

Now look, I share my home with a very precocious

12-year-old Talmud enthusiast, and though he is genuinely and impressively interested in the

finer points of halakha or Jewish law, he's also a 12-year-old boy, which means that whenever

the Talmud mentions poop, he is overjoyed.

And the Talmud mentions poop, as we know, quite a bit, like in today's pages,

Manachot 68 and 69.

The rabbis are discussing tools which play an important part in the temple work, you know,

all those sacred shovels we have been reading about for weeks now.

We know that most tools are susceptible to become ritually impure

should they come into contact, say, with a dead body.

Tools made from metal or wood or bone or pottery,

both according to the Torah and according to the rabbis, can become

defiled and therefore would need to be purified before they are used again.

But on today's duff, we learned that there are three categories of utensils that can

absolutely never ever become ritually defiled, no matter what they touch.

Utensals made of stone.

Utensals made of earth that was not fully baked and refined.

And utensils involving, you guessed it, poop.

What does that mean?

I will let Rabbi Rami Barchama explain.

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