Menachot 75 and 76 - Baking Is Just Making a Bomb, Slowly

Take One Daf Yomi

Tablet Magazine

Judaism, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 565 Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2026

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

On today's pages, Menachot 75 and 76, the Talmud gets precise about how oil is mixed into loaves and smeared onto wafers for the meal offering — and one small detail stops us cold: the priest was instructed to smear the oil across the wafer in the shape of the Greek letter chi, essentially drawing a large X with his fingers. It raises a question about whether Jewish observance is really as rule-bound and mechanical as we sometimes assume. Can a single stroke of oil on a cracker be an act of genuine creative expression? Listen and find out.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there and welcome back to take one the podcast.
0:15.8	That brings you just one precise page of Tomlid each day.
0:19.7	And on today's pages, Makot 75 and 76, we get
0:23.7	descriptive passages that feel like something, well, feel like something straight out of the Great
0:30.5	British Bake Off, if we're being honest. Take a listen. Concerning the mixing of oil into the loaves
0:36.9	and the smearing of oil upon the wafers,
0:39.0	the sage is taught in a baraita. An oven-baked meal offering that comes as half-loaves and half-wafers,
0:45.0	i.e. five of each, may be brought according to the opinion of Rabbi Shimon, who does not require
0:50.2	10 items of a uniform type. How is the oil applied to this offering? According to one opinion, he brings a log of oil, which is the requisite quantity to accompany a tenth of an etha of flour and divides it into two parts. Half of the oil is used for the loaves and half of the oil is used for the wafers. As for the loaves, he mixes them with the oil, and as for the wafers, he smears them. And he smears the oil on the wafer over the entire surface, not in the shape of the letter key, the Greek letter key that looks like R.X. And he returns the rest of the oil to mix into the loaves.
1:27.6	Rabbi Shimon Benihudas says in the name of Rabbi Shimon,
1:30.3	he smears them in a shape similar to the letter Chih,
1:33.4	and the rest of the oil is eaten by the priests.
1:37.3	So this right here was a difficult passage for me to read.
1:41.3	Why?
1:42.1	Because everybody knows that humanity could be really neatly divided
1:45.7	into two types of people, those who like to cook and those who like to bake. Over at team
1:52.9	cooking, we free souls saunter over to the kitchen, observe our domain, and then gingerly toss
2:00.0	whatever we find into the pot, subjected to some heat, add some domain, and then gingerly toss whatever we find into the pot, subject it to
2:02.5	some heat, add some salt, and voila! We may follow a recipe, sure, but our greatest asset is our heart,
2:09.8	not our brain. We feel what the meat wants. We sense what the vegetables need. We may or may not
2:16.8	have technique, and it may or may not matter because ultimately, cooking
2:21.1	is an expression of unfettered creativity.
	...

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