Concepts of Scripture in Mordechai Breuer 273“severance pay” (ha’anaka) or in the very fact that the master is consistently
addressed in the second person. In Leviticus, freedom is the inalienable
destiny of the slave — for it is the slave who left Egypt — whose servitude
cannot extend into the Jubilee year: the master is alternatively referred to
in the second or third person — in fact, Leviticus does not ignore the situa-
tion in which the master is a Gentile. In Deuteronomy, it is the master who
reenacts God’s act of redemption and who is therefore obligated to free his
slave aft er the term of service. From the perspective of Exodus and Deuter-
onomy, stressing the master’s responsibilities, the slave can forfeit manu-
mission by declining to go free; these texts are oblivious to the slave’s right
to freedom. In that case, his bondage is renewed l ’olam, in the literal sense,
forever. Leviticus, however, is concerned not with the limits of the master’s
obligation but with the unconditional doctrine of freedom that knows no
diff erence between master and slave and does not tolerate the possibility
that the slave will relinquish his freedom and prolong his servitude.
Now if we were to isolate the sections in Exodus and Deuteronomy,
oblivious to the aspect revealed in Leviticus, we would interpret l ’olam ac-
cording to Rashbam’s plain meaning, and if this were all the Torah had to
say on the topic, we would conclude that the Hebrew slave who declined
freedom is subject to interminable servitude. Conversely, were the Torah’s
teaching exhausted by the Leviticus passage, we would leave out the as-
pects embodied in the other texts. Peshat does not harmonize but hardens
and juxtaposes the multiple voices in the Torah. Peshat alone would yield
a fragmented, inconsistent code of law. Th e work of derash is to reinter-
pret the verses that are, at the level of peshat, understood independently
of one another and to fuse them in a grand synthesis. Th e word l ’olam car-
ries its plain, unforced, Rashbamian meaning in the isolated context, when
the Torah speaks in one voice; when the Torah becomes polyphonic, l ’olam
must be reinterpreted in conformity with the whole, mobilizing a second-
ary, perhaps fi gurative sense of the phrase, one that would otherwise seem
awkward and exceptional.6
Th is example takes us into the heart of R. Breuer’s approach. We can
look at this entire discussion as a response to source criticism: where its
practitioners discern several confl icting sources, combined haphazardly
by a series of redactors and eventually harmonized through rabbinic cre-
ativity, Breuer perceives the polyphonic voice of the Ribbono shel Olam,
the Master of the universe, heard by the human auditor in its multifarious
glory, formulated as a unifi ed legal code through the agency of the Oral
Law. From this perspective, the question Breuer is answering is how what