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

delightful page of Talmud each day.

And today's page, Menachot 72, kicks off a new

perik or chapter of our tractate explaining precisely how the different kinds of meal offerings

were brought. Among them are rickikim, or unleavened wafers. It's not a fun word to say

rickikikim. Or, if you will, those are basically toasted crackers.

Reading about those crackers reminded me of one of my all-time favorite quotes in basically

all of literature from Ian Fleming's Casino Royale. Checking into a luxury hotel, what other kind of hotel would he check into,

James Bond is sitting down for dinner with the beautiful but treacherous Vesper Lind.

She orders caviars and appetizer, and he immediately flags down the waiter and orders extra toast.

And then comes one of the wisest lines in modern literature.

The trouble always is, he explained to Vesper, not how to get enough caviar, but how to get

enough toast with it. It may seem like a throwaway observation, but 007 knows what he is talking about.

He understands that life's riches, the caviar, if you will, are actually surprisingly easy to come by,

and that once you've got them and you can grab your little mother-of-pe-spoon and gobble them by the heapful,

you're set. But toast, that foundational and fundamental food stuff, toast is a much more difficult thing. How so? Well,

today's page of Talmud sort of explains it all. God, the commentators tell us, loved the mincha offering most of all, because the mincha offering,

those unleavened crackers and loaves, were brought by the poor.

The rich could always sashay in with their oxen and their sheep or their goats or their

birds, offering them in abundance and in style.

But the poor had nothing to offer, but a little bit of flour.

And not just flour, but the flour they so desperately needed for their own sustenance

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