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The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod)A Play by Elie Wiesel Translated by Marion Wiesel Introduction by Robert McAfee Brown Afterword by Matthew Foxnbsp; Where is God when innocent human beings suffer? This drama lays bare the most vexing questions confronting the moral imagination.nbsp; Set in a Ukranian village in the year 1649, this haunting play takes place in the aftermath of a pogrom. Only two Jews, Berish the innkeeper and his daughter Hannah, have survived the brutal Cossack raids. When three itinerant actors arrive in town to perform a Purim play, Berish demands that they stage a mock trial of God instead, indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil. Berish, a latter-day Job, is ready to take on the role of prosecutor. But who will defend God? A mysterious stranger named Sam, who seems oddly familiar to everyone present, shows up just in time to volunteer. nbsp; The idea for this play came from an event that Elie Wiesel witnessed as a boy in Auschwitz: "Three rabbis--all erudite and pious men--decided one evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried." nbsp; Inspired and challenged by this play, Christian theologians Robert McAfee Brown and Matthew Fox, in a new Introduction and Afterword, join Elie Wiesel in the search for faith in a world where God is silent.… (more)
User reviews
This book is not only a reflection of a real trial that supposedly took place in the death camps of the Holocaust, but also parallels the book of Job in the Hebrew bible. I thought it was really good (but I do also love everything Wiesel writes). I just found out last week that I will be reading this book again with Elie Wiesel as my actual teacher in my class this fall, so if I have some real insight into the book I will let you know. I don’t want to write too much and give away the ending, which is quite profound.
I've previously read Night (autobiographical of his time in the camp) and Twilight (a novel about a post-Holocaust survivor). Elie is a fantastic writer who cuts down to the bone on what is real about the horrors of things such as this.
The Trial of God is done as a play, and set during the pogroms, rather than during the Holocaust. It's set on the holiday of Purim. It's a terrific play that cuts into how can God allow things like suffering, especially to his chosen people, as well as how can he sit back and allow people to kill, rape, pillage, destroy in his name. In many ways its more a retrospect of ourselves than just of God. The characters are not so much putting God on trial, but themselves, and at the end of the play, though the trial of God continues, the trial of Men ends.
Berish struggles with the unbreakable silence of God, and resists the suggestion that tragedy cannot be understood from the limited perspective of humanity: "I want the truth to be told. Whose truth? Mine! But if mine is not His as well, then He's worse than I thought. Then it would mean that he He gave us the taste, the passion of truth without telling us that this truth is not true!" Berish believes in God fervently, if only so he can have some reason and target for his anger. Otherwise, what is there? The alternative to believing that God has allowed tragedy to happen is that there is no reason for tragedy nor any possibility of salvation from suffering. So his faith and his anger are both steadfast, upholding one another in an odd sense. Faith is shown not to be peace, but an unending struggle with God, thereby leaving the verdict in deliberation, "for the trial will continue - without us."