Festers frygtforløsende funktion i jødisk religion

To move beyond the finding that tightly regulated rituals and affective feasts seem to occur in pairs, this article asks why this is so. The article draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's understanding of cultural phenomena, including religion, as a protection against chaos, and on Peter A. Levine's understanding of adequate responses to potentially traumatising experiences to prevent emotional blockage. It analyses four calendar feasts in Jewish religion: the Feast of Weeks, the Feast of Tabernacles, Passover, and Purim, based on the thesis that calendar feasts have evolved to facilitate collective 'shake-and-run'-reactions when people have had reason to 'freeze' in response to potentially chaotic and life-threatening situations during the year, albeit in changing contexts. Concretely, the article asks, what anxiety relief do these four calendar feasts offer in different phases of Israelite-Jewish history of religion?.