270 Shalom Carmy
of R. Abraham Isaac Kook, the Chief Rabbi of Palestine in the 1920s and
’30s, whose mystical thought has been enormously infl uential on modern
Orthodoxy. Th e early essays explicitly cite R. Kook, especially his view that
heresy is overcome not through immediate rejection but via a dialectical
confrontation in which the “palace of Torah” is rebuilt so as to take over
what is valid in the heretical ideas.
Rabbinic tradition, not just mysticism, had much to say about diff er-
ent aspects of God. Th e Rabbis notably speak of His attribute of judgment
(middat ha-din) and His attribute of mercy (middat ha-rahamim). Indeed,
in discussing the names of God in Genesis, the Midrash states that God
“intended” to create the world with the former, represented by the name
Elokim, but saw that the world could not survive and joined it with the
Tetragrammaton, representing mercy. From one perspective, judgment and
mercy are contradictory and thus mutually exclusive. For Rabbinic con-
sciousness, such contradictions are not only allowable; if religious reality is
to be communicated in words, they are necessary. For Breuer, this kind of
duality became a paradigm of the multiple voices expressed in the Torah.
In Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 – 3, the diff erent aspects of God are juxtaposed.
In the fl ood story, the diff erent strands are intertwined. Th e multiplicity of
voices is not confi ned to diff erent names of God. Other apparent redun-
dancies are also grist for the exegetical mill. Where, for example, in Gen-
esis 11 – 12, Abraham seems to leave for Canaan twice, the repetition is due
to the dual motivation of his journey: one motive is natural, so to speak,
beginning with Terah’s interrupted migration; the other is driven by God’s
command. As we shall see, dual or triple themes, some of them in mutual
tension, predominate in the legal sections of the Torah as well.
Th e third factor played little or no role in Breuer’s intellectual forma-
tion but arguably facilitated the reception of his work from the 1970s on.
One of the most widespread trends in both modern Orthodoxy and ultra-
Orthodoxy in the 20th century is the so-called analytic school of Talmud
study, oft en identifi ed with the thought of the 19th-century Lithuanian
Talmudic scholar R. Hayyim Soloveitchik (1853 – 1918) and his descendants
(known, from the location of his yeshivah, as the Brisker [Brest-Litovsk]
system of Talmudic study). One of the key terms of this school is “two
dinim” (two laws). Th e Brisker scholar examines a set of Talmudic or me-
dieval legal texts, excavating apparent tensions and confl icts therein. Th e
solution to these diffi culties is the discovery that what seems to be one
principle is actually a bundle of ideas, as when the word kavvana means
“purpose” in connection with the work prohibited on the Sabbath and