Thread by @ZoharAtkins

Finding parallels in history is a Midrashic impulse; it’s the impulse of the Seder that says “in every generation”

It’s the impulse that imputes the first yeshiva, anachronistically, to Shem and Ever

It’s the impulse that locates the Temple Mount at the same place where Abraham sacrificed a ram in place of Isaac

It’s the same impulse that positions Rahab as an echo of Tamar, Joseph’s brothers as a variation on Cain

So the idea that the Shoah is a singularity that cannot be compared to anything is very untraditional, very modern, very unrabbinic

If the Exodus is a repetition of Creation, then the foundation of Jewish tradition is the principle of history rhyming, if not repeating

Only a secular consciousness could condemn Holocaust comparisons as inappropriate

Only a consciousness that seeks to free itself from a philosophy of history would say “what happened, happened” (ma d’hava hava”)

And only a consciousness that is embedded in myth rather than demythologization would see every catastrophe as a repetition of a previous one

As Walter Benjamin wrote, “the angel of history sees one single storm blowing from paradise”—there is davka no way to differentiate concentration camps in Germany from concentration camps anywhere else.

So here’s my meta-take: the question of comparison is not a matter of fact but metaphysical worldview

Tell me what you think about historical comparison and I will tel you who you are

There is nothing more religious, for better and for worse, than equating dissimilar things

And nothing is more secular than insisting on the inappropriateness of analogy.

Also, this dialectic is part of the history of religion itself: here’s a paradox—

Lurianic Kabbalah which explains every historical event as a metaphysical variation on divine trauma was itself born of a sense that the Expulsion from Spain had no historical analogue

The Jews of Mainz who died in first crusade, likewise had to invent a theology to account for their experience because they found no precedent for it in tradition...

Now, in contrast to them, we simply fold their story into a general pattern of martyrology

George Steiner says the Holocaust lacks intelligibility; that we should prefer the paintings of the children of Tereisenstadt and the poems of Celan to history books

Yet Holocaust education by definition chafes against this premise ; if something is intelligible it admits of pattern recognition and loses its singularity; becomes a cipher for something besides itself

Sometimes a concentration camp is just a concentration camp; but other times it’s a zone of “bare life” (agamben), a symptom of unresolved philosophical-political problems

To decide between these is not a matter of weighing evidence nor can it be reduced to mere pragmatism

There is an inexorable tension at work in our speech on the matter

And also, what’s happening at the border in detention centers is an abysmal horror we ignore and allow to our shame

And yet it is an expression of a problem much larger than a single simple matter of policy or law can address