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267 Chapter 15 Concepts of Scripture in Mordechai Breuer Shalom Carmy To most outsiders who have heard of Rabbi Mordechai Breuer’s “theory of aspects” (torat ha-beh . inot), Breuer is a dark figure who has devised for his rigorously Orthodox confreres a counterapproach to biblical criticism so potent that they now thrive on the data that should be poisoning their faith, like bacilli that have evolved resistance to antibiotics. Alternatively, he is seen as one who has constructed a halfway house where academically mobile refugees from Orthodoxy can measure themselves for the trappings of biblical criticism on their way up to some form of orthopraxy. Both are correct. Like many Orthodox Israeli educators and thinkers of his generation, Breuer was born in Germany (1921), studied in Israeli yeshivot, had no formal academic training, and spent the first twenty years of his career as a high school teacher of Talmud and other religious subjects. Beginning in the late 1960s, he taught at a variety of postsecondary yeshivot and seminaries . Most of his early publications dealt with the history of the Masoretic text of the Bible, which has served as the accepted text of the Bible among Jews for over a millennium. A multivolume biblical commentary in Hebrew that is widely used among Orthodox and non-Orthodox Israelis (the Daat Mikra Bible produced by Mosad haRav Kook in Jerusalem from the 1970s on) was done under Breuer’s aegis and includes his notes. This aspect of his work was widely accepted and played a major role in his award of the Israel Prize (the highest prize awarded annually by the State of Israel) in 1999. Meanwhile, Breuer launched a series of programmatic papers, beginning in the late 1950s, that sketched a new Orthodox response to biblical criticism. Despite initial incomprehension, he persisted in refining his 268 Shalom Carmy “theory of aspects” (torat ha-beh . inot), eventually writing several books of applied studies. On the one hand, Breuer maintains that all the literary phenomena adduced by the critics to show that the Pentateuch is the product of multiple authors are compatible with divine authorship. On the other hand, he insists that unitary authorship by a human being is impossible . In each instance when the critics posit multiple authors, Breuer too discerns different voices. One task of the religious student is to grasp each of these voices in isolation, unearthing the theology, narrative vision, or legal positions implicit in each one. Finally, one also investigates the ways in which the Torah as a whole integrates and mediates these voices. No human author, in his opinion, could have orchestrated this multiplicity of voices. Thus, either the critics are right, in which case we have a jumble of conflicting writers spliced together, or there is a divine Author expressing a complex message by employing different voices.1 This, in a nutshell, is Breuer’s thesis. To appreciate his theological contribution , it may be instructive to step back from Breuer’s confrontation with academic Bible scholarship and to identify the elements in his intellectual makeup that stand behind his orientation. Breuer’s views can be seen as the crossroads of four different strands of Jewish thought. First, Breuer was the great-grandson of R. Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), founder of the Frankfurt school of neo-Orthodoxy, and the nephew of Isaac Breuer (1883–1946), the most creative exponent of that position in the first half of the 20th century. The elder Breuer produced his theology with a portrait of Kant on his study wall and a version of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in his heart. Pure scientific reason yields an understanding of the world as a closed causal system but can say nothing about its possible transcendent origin. Thus, it cannot legitimately affirm or deny the metaphysical doctrine of creation. Mordechai Breuer adopted an analogous thesis for the Bible. Modern biblical criticism is absolutely reliable and “scientific” within its logical limitations: it can determine authoritatively that if the Torah (for it is the Pentateuch that is Breuer’s primary focus of attention) is a humanly authored book, it must have been composed in exactly the way the critics have hypothesized. But whether the Torah is a humanly authored book is beyond the determination of science. If it is a divinely authored book, then the apparent evidence of multiple authors is to be explained differently; Breuer, we shall see, proposes his theory of aspects as the explanation. As noted, the theory of aspects, as...

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