FLOUR POWER is our second consecutive text-based Gemara mini-series focusing on the Seasonal Barely Harvest and the Firstling Omer Offering. This is the eponymous Temple Rite linked to Sefirat Ha’Omer, the annual Post-Passover Counting of Days that leads us up to Shavuot — the holiday commemorating the Giving of the Torah.
The series opens with the initial steps taken once the fresh Barley is cut, to turn grain into Flour so that it can be processed into the dough of that famous firstling grain offering, known by the Chalice in which it was brought: the proverbial Omer!
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In our Season of Sefira, Tom’s Talmud Tisch annually focuses on Tractate Menachot.
This offering initiates a fresh mini-series called “FLOUR POWER” as our studies continue on Daf Samech Vov (page 66a) with a brand-new Mishna. The first Episode is aptly entitled: “THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY.”
In this earliest formal documentation of our Oral Tradition of what’s done to prepare freshly cut stalks of barley — to later allow for the extraction of dry flour from moist grain — we’re first filling baskets and bringing them to the Temple Courtyard.
This Episode introduces us to a fascinating series of steps that might include things like the cabbage stalk beating of fresh stalks but certainly has kernels singed in a perforated pipe, then left exposed to the wind to dry the barley fully.
This opening segment of the Mishna will alter be followed in part two with the milling and sifting flour production details. Eventually this all will lead us into a highly intriguing analyses and discovery of Beit HaMikdash rites and rituals.
This inaugural teaching, of our second mini-series on Sefirat Ha’Omer, has been sponsored by Allan and Ira Hetz to commemorate the Yahrtzeit of Ira’s late father, Pesach Tzvi Ben Yitzchak Chaim OBM.
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