Allayers Of Anxiety Poem by gershon hepner

Without objectivity associated with
the supernatural we get authority
from so-called holy men, whose use of law and myth
enables them to function with superiority
that in an earlier age would have depended on
the mastery of rituals and a magic text;
the change entails an adaptation of the con,
that’s how the so-called holy guide those who’re perplexed.


Inspired by a passage in a book by Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,1997, p.460) :

[[T]he role-related authority of rabbis derived from the fact that they were able to provide others with guidelines for everyday life. They were “allayers of anxiety” like the Christian “holy men” for whom Peter Brown uses this term (“The Rise and Fall of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, ” JRS 61 [1971]: 80-101, p.98) . By advising their contemporaries on various issues and making decisions for them in particular cases, they helped them deal with life in the world. Brown suggests that this role was necessitated by a “crisis of freedom” in late antiquity, when “the objectivity associated with the supernatural” was no longer securely lodged in impersonal and enduring institutions—in great temple sites...Men were left with nothing to fall back on than other men.”…By advising others and making decisions for others on the basis of their knowledge, rabbis took responsibility for others and gave orientation to those who had little or no direct access to learning.

Hezser points out that Niklas Luhmann (Funktionen und Folgen formaler Organisation, Berlin,1964) calls the last process described above Unsicherheitsabsorption, in which Person X makes decisions that he transmits to Person Y, who acts on them without the information available to Person X. X’s responsibility becomes a substitute for Y’s lack of information. “In diesem Prozess ersetst die Verantwortung fehlende Informationen und schafft damit ein Gewissheitsäquivalent” 9p.174) .

7/21/08