Menachot 58 - Perfectly Middling

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

mediocre page of Talmud each day.

Huh?

Did I just call a doff of the Talmud mediocre?

It's not, of course, but the idea it explores is, well, all about the majesty of mediocrity.

The rabbis repeat and discuss at length, the prohibition from the vidicus instructing

us that two things may not be brought as meal offerings, no sew or leaven and no dvush

or honey, which at first glance is very strange.

Then we can somehow understand, you know, Passover and everything.

But honey had a lesser mind, like my own, been in charge of arranging the sacrifices in

the temple.

Honey would have been my first go too.

It's sweet, it's viscous, it's gorgeous, it smells great, it tastes amazing.

So why not burn it right up on the altar?

The rumbun are beloved machmanities, taking the historical view noted that leaven and

honey were precisely the offerings that pagans burnt on their vile altars, which means that

we Jews had to take a radically different approach to differentiate ourselves.

Other rabbis took the culinary path and argued that since we were obligated to add salt

to all sacrifices, it made sense that honey was verboten as honey and salt, you don't

really have to be a chef to understand that, they don't really exactly mix nicely together.

But as the late great Rabbi Adin Stein's also explained, there is an even deeper reasoning

here.

And it comes to us courtesy of Sefer Hachinuch, the 13th century composition written by

an unknown author in order to teach children all 613 commandments.

The Torah, Rabbi Adin Stein's else wrote, did not want sacrifices, brought from powerful

elements that affect others, so causes leavening, honey changes the flavor of whatever it's

mixed with.

It's just Sefer Hachinuch concluded just like creation itself, God mixed the attribute

of justice and the attribute of mercy to create a situation of normalcy in the world.

In other words, we deliberately want our offerings not to be too sweet, too overwhelming.

We want them to be normal, almost middling, because normal and middling is the basis for

all great and sustainable human activities.

Not convinced?

Let me tell you a story I may have shared with you before, a story about one of the most

spiritually meaningful journeys of my life, a journey that involved the quest for a desperately

needed cup of coffee.

My wife and I were in Italy to attend a friend's wedding, and because neither of us paid particular

attention to small and insignificant details like attenuaries or hotel checkout times,

we found ourselves compelled to embark on an all-night drive from the heel of the boot

all the way up north to leafy tuskeny.

At some point, maybe it was 2am, maybe 4am, maybe just outside Rome and maybe past

Bologna, I felt I needed a shot of espresso or else.

We drove for, I don't know, 10 miles, then 20, then 30 more in search of the elusive elixir.

We got on and off the highway.

We took long detours in small towns, at one point contemplating knocking on the first

door we saw, and offering whoever answered a crisp $100 bill for 2 minutes alone with

their Machiata machine.

Finally, we found a small roadside restaurant that was opened, ordered to espresso and drank

with abandoned.

Had one of Raphael's dreamy-eyed angels been the barista, we wouldn't have been surprised.

The brew was an ounce and a half of heaven.

For the rest of the drive, I could think of nothing but the espresso.

Why I fumed, why could I not get such a shot state-side?

Back home, I was renting to my wife who was trying her best to nap, we would be lucky

to settle for a flavorless latte over at Starbucks.

Yeah, she quipped half asleep, but there will be one open and available every six miles.

And then it hit me.

America wasn't really a meritocracy.

It was a mediocracy, a nation dedicated to the mass production of perfectly acceptable

and always accessible goods, services, people, and ideas, and it was precisely this middleing

quality that made us both great and good.

While other cultures shone their lights on a handful of rare and precious jewels while

everything and everyone else was plunged in darkness, it was always mourning in America

because we had realized it was better to forget about the absolutely perfect and settle

for the best faith attempt instead.

This mediocrity of ours isn't just a backbone of our economy, allowing Leviathan's like McDonald's

to flourish by promising the same, consistently unremarkable bite today in Akron you enjoyed

last Tuesday and Denver, it's also the organizing principle of our unique brand of morality,

an American ethos that rewards effort, not excellence.

And that's precisely the idea captured so neatly by today's stuff.

It's no big deal to deliver some celestial and perfectly sweet honey drenched offering.

Life is about taking the humble and bland hand you've been dealt and elevating it through

hard work, through meets votes or commandments, through diligence, through paying a lot of

attention and sweating the small stuff.

And when we do, the results are far greater than even the sweetest spoonful of honey could

ever deliver.

This has been Take One.

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The show is hosted by me, Leah Lieberts, our executive producer is Josh Cross and the

show is produced and edited by Josh as well as by Quinn Wall.

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I hope we have made your day a little bit more tombootic.