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6 Explicit and Implicit Religious Life and Teaching There are, says Fowler,I "master stories" that "we teU ourselves and by which we interpret and respond to the events which impinge on our lives. Our master stories are the characterizations of the patterns of power-in-action that disclose the ultimate meanings ofour lives. " Master stories are basic faith understandings of reality and value by which we work. For example, one person 's master story may be "The universal vocation of persons is the humanization of humankind." Another's may be HIt won't make any difference a hundred years from now." These two individual master stories shape basic approaches to the world; in the first case, reaching out constantly for human self-realization, responsibility, and involvement, and in the second. stoic perspective and a degree of existential remoteness. The experience of people may be considered recognizably religious when their master stories are shaped and affirmed by the "stories" that constitute the traditions of a faith. They hear these traditional stories and believe them, and the stories become a paradigm of action for them. That is, the traditional stories are deemed worthy of being absorbed into one's master story, of exemplifying it. For the person whose master story is "People are good when they do God's will," a dramatic religious Jewish story is the Binding of Isaac. If the person's master story is "God helps those who help themselves," the story of Hanukkah and Hasmonean heroism will be especially meaningful. Stories that evoke or affirm a religious experience of truth thus reflect different master stories; they are often elaborate and intricate. Let us look at six such stories. Explicit and lmplicit Religious Life and Teaching 109 A. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul ... (Deut. 6:5). Rabbi Akiva says: With all thy soul-even if He takes thy soul from thee. . . . When Rabbi Akiva was taken out to be killed by the Romans, it was the time for the reading of the Shema, and they kept flaying his flesh with iron combs, yet he accepted upon himself the yoke ofthe kingdom of Heaven [i.e., he recited the ShemaJ. His disciples said to him: Even now, master? He said to them: AU my days I was troubled by this exposition: "With aU thy soul"-even if He take thy soul from thee. I said, if only it were in my power to fulfHI this. And now that it is in my power, shall I not fulfill it? He kept prolonging [the word] One, until his spirit left him while [still] saying One. A voiced issued from Heaven and said: Happy are you, Rabbi Akiva, that your spirit has left you at One.2 In a sense, this is a terrifying story. It was Rabbi Akiva who had made the halakhic ruling that the scriptural command to love God "with all thy soul" meant' 'even when He takes your souL" And it is he whom the Romans torture to death, and when they do so, it happens to be the time for the recitation of the Shema. Rabbi Akiva's "story" is that one recites the Shema at the proper time regardless of the circumstances; this is what he apparently meant in his ruling "even when He takes thy soul from thee," and he himself exemplifies this teaching. The disciples have difficulty with this "story." Can one "receive the yoke of the kingdom of Heaven" 3 when the kingdom is so blatantly absent? Can he "believe" it while being tortured? Akiva repeats, through his halakhic explication, his master story. What the Romans are doing is existentially irrelevant. Life is defined by accepting God's kingdom through the halakhah , and Akiva himself had the privilege to expound part of it. It is, at that moment, not primarily the time of his death, but the time for the recitation of the Shemo.. That the Shema takes precedence over other things, such as confession of sins, meditation. or other preparations for death Akiva "knows" from the words "with all thy soul." Berkovits4 has shown how this story both shaped and afflrmed the" story" of Jews during the Holocaust. It is reflected in responsaofthe Holocaust period and in the attitude of some Jews during that terrible time that the Nazis could "go to hell," that they were, in a sense, a "mere" natural catastrophe. B. A story that is not unrelated...

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