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

0:00Hey there and welcome back to take one the podcast that brings you just one precise page of Talmud each day and on today's pages mid-Achot 75 and 76 we get descriptive passages that feel like something, well feel like something straight out of the great British Bake-Off if we're being honest take a listen concerning the mixing of oil into the loaves and the smearing of oil upon the wafers the sage is taught in a baraita an oven baked meal offering that comes as half loaves and half wafers i.e. five of each may be brought according to the opinion of Rabbi Shimon who does not require ten 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 effa of flour and divides it into two parts half of the oil

1:06is 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 rx and he returns the rest of the oil to mix into the loaves the Rabbi Shimon on Benihudas and the name of Rabbi Shimon on he smears them in a shape similar to the letter chi and the rest of the oil is eaten by the priests so this right here was a difficult passage for me to read why because everybody knows that humanity could be really neatly divided into two types of people those who like to cook and those who like to bake over a team cooking we free souls saunter over to the kitchen observe our domain and then gingerly toss whatever we find into the pot subjected to some heat add some salt and voila we may follow recipe sure but our greatest asset is our heart not our brain

2:11we feel what the meat wants we sense what the vegetables need we may or may not have to technique and it may or may not matter because ultimately cooking is an expression of unfettered creativity baking in the other hand it's a bit like making a bomb you step in sweating add the ingredients very carefully one after the other and you know that if you miscalculate even by just a tiny little bit the whole thing will go kaboom and end up a flat foul mess bakers are rule followers glaring at their precise recipes and following the stages with precision and excellence or else being very much a cook and a world class disaster of a baker I approached these very baking heavy pages like today's with trepidation here I thought were more unforgiving instructions this time with the added pressure that should a step go wrong the cake in question

3:11is not a mere afternoon snack but rather a holy offering to god himself but reading a long I was struck by an incredible tidbit that made me rethink my long standing trepidation of all things baking it was a bit about the priests smearing the oil and the shape of the Greek letter which in case it's all Greek to you again looks pretty much like our letter X there was something touching about that description evoking the image of the priest standing there and smearing the oil over the wafer in two long crossing lines the whole thing felt much more art than science did I have it wrong all along then our cooks and bakers not really as far part as we think the question may sound trivial even you know a bit silly but I think it betrays a surprising unexpected depth because we tend to think of the priests and by extension of so much of halacha so much of Jewish life as just rule bound and law obsessed interested mainly in the

4:15mechanics of instructions and little more and here comes this tender moment of drawing a letter on the wafer with your fingers that reminds us that even though Jewish observance like baking may be a lot about following along carefully at its heart as a tender artful yearning an intimate moment of creative expression of letting the soul run free I'm still probably never going to bake anything anytime soon but I'm happy to have a kinder perspective on those who do this is been take one if you enjoy the show and I hope that you do you are really going to love the new-ish book by me called how the tomat could change your life surprisingly modern advice from a

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