Here we’ll talk about how the flour was sifted. The Mishnah says: The flour of the Minchat HaOmer (Omer meal offering), which was made of barley and had a lot of chaff in it, was sifted through 13 different sieves stacked on top of each other until the flour was caught at the very bottom. The top sieve had the biggest holes, and the barley flour went into it, where the bigger pieces of chaff were caught. Then it went through 11 more sieves. The holes in each one were smaller and smaller, so the smaller pieces of chaff were caught, all the way down to the bottom sieve. The holes in the bottom sieve were smaller than the flour. Therefore, any dust, any flour dust, came out, and the flour was caught in that bottom sieve. It was used for the Mincha (meal offering).
The Shtei HaLechem (two loaves), which was made from fresh wheat and had less chaff than the barley, was sifted through 11 sieves stacked one on top of the other. The Lechem HaPanim (showbread), which was made from old wheat and therefore had even less chaff than the Shtei HaLechem, was sifted through 11 sieves stacked one on top of the other. That’s the opinion of Tanna Kamma (first tanna). But Rabbi Shimon is going to disagree. He’s going to say there’s no formality here. We don’t need a certain number of sieves. You don’t need to start with a certain amount of flour, like we said in the last Mishnah. All you need is the end result. That’s all we care about. Rabbi Shimon omer (says): There was no set amount of grain from which the Mincha had to be prepared. There was no set number of sieves through which the flour had to be sifted in order to use it. A person had to bring as much flour as was necessary after it had already been sifted, with all the impurities, all the chaff, removed. It doesn’t matter how long it was sifted. The Pasuk (verse) tells us: It just has to be sifted as much as possible, as much as was necessary in order to offer it properly. We care about the final product without anything else in it. And that’s what’s allowed to be used for the Mincha. We don’t care how much grain you started with to produce it. We don’t care how many sieves it went through. Always, all we care about is that you have fine flour. That’s what we get out of the Pasuk. It doesn’t matter how it was made or the production process. The Torah seemingly only cares about the end result.