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As we learned in the Mishna on yesterday’s daf when the kometz – the fistful of flour was taken from the meal offering she-lo lishmah – with improper intentions – the meal offering remains a valid sacrifice, although it is not credited to the owner of the offering and he will have to bring a replacement for it.
According to the Gemara, it appears that Rabbi Shimon disagrees with this ruling and rules that such a meal offering would be credited to the owner. He explains that a meal offering is qualitatively different than an ordinary animal sacrifice. Animal sacrifices all have the same act of slaughter, the same collection of blood, etc. In a meal offering, however, the preparation of the sacrifice makes it evident whether the sacrifice has oil or does not and whether it is to be fried in a pan or cooked in a pot so the kohen‘s intentions are less important, and the minḥa will remain perfectly valid.
Yet from another baraita it seems that Rabbi Shimon accepts the ruling of the Mishna!
We explore how the concept of lishmah (proper sacrificial intent) functions not merely as a subjective mental state but as a structural principle embedded within Scripture itself. Through careful attention to Rava's hermeneutical method, we try to show how rabbinic jurisprudence constructs legal categories through textual totalization, wherein the presence or absence of unifying formulae in the Torah determines the permissibility of cross-intent substitution.