267Chapter 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 fi gure 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 for-
mal academic training, and spent the fi rst 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 semi-
naries. Most of his early publications dealt with the history of the Maso-
retic 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. Th is as-
pect 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, begin-
ning in the late 1950s, that sketched a new Orthodox response to biblical
criticism. Despite initial incomprehension, he persisted in refi ning his