2 Credit Hours

by

Rob Barrett

August 14, 2000

As a teenager in the Auschwitz death camp, degraded and suffering, facing the possibility of unjust death, Elie Wiesel witnessed three Jewish scholars trying God and finding Him guilty of crimes against humankind. After reflecting on this outcome, they recited evening prayers. Wiesel’s play, The Trial of God, is a depiction of this experience, recorded so that we can sip those tensions which he has deeply drunk.

Wiesel sets his story in a Ukrainian village in 1649, after a brutal pogrom that has left alive only one Jewish innkeeper and his tortured daughter. Berish, the innkeeper, has returned to some semblance of a normal life, alternating between raging at both God and men, and dotingly loving his insane daughter. Three Jewish minstrels wander into his inn, seeking to perform a celebratory Purim play for the Jews of the village, unaware that the village Jews are but corpses. After the players learn of their inappropriate aims, Berish suggests they put on a more serious play: a trial with God as the defendant for the suffering and death in his village. Berish’s proposal is accepted. The minstrels are the judges and Berish jumps at the opportunity to prosecute God. But who is willing to take up the challenge of defending God against the cries of the suffering and dead? The minstrels refuse out of fear: "With me as lawyer, He risks finding himself in hell. … I will be the one who needs to be defended" (p. 85). But the shadowy stranger, Sam, willingly volunteers, confidently unafraid: "I am never intimidated" (p. 122). The trial opens in the shadow of the priest’s warning that another pogrom will soon finish off the work previously begun. Berish presents his charges against God for complicity in the pogrom, echoing the now silent screams of the dying Jews. But Sam counters with God’s higher ways, His compassion for the suffering, His judgment of the perpetrators, and the necessity of loving and worshipping Him. Sam’s convincing speech carries the day in the last moments of the trial. As the angry mob threatens, Berish’s rage increases, but the minstrel judges are awed by Sam’s steady faith and beg him to strengthen their own. In the final moment, Sam reveals himself to be Satan, the only one willing to defend God’s ways to humanity. The irony only deepens as the drama ends with Sam commanding the final pogrom.

The Trial of God retells the story of Job in the setting of Jewish persecution. Berish speaks for Job. Berish, like Job, formerly lived amicably with God (p. 45, cf. Job 1:5). Now, with his life torn apart, he displays Job’s combination of indefatigable faith and seething outrage. He charges, "God is the enemy" (p. 54; cf. Job 33:10) and yet the thought of betraying his faith by converting to Christianity is unthinkable (p. 46). Similarly, Job declared, "Though He slay me, I will hope in Him. Nevertheless I will argue my ways before Him" (Job 33:15, NASB). Berish and Job both assert that their suffering is the intentional persecution of God: "God sought me out and God struck me down" (p. 26; cf. Job 7:17-20). Berish charges God with being merciless (p. 42), cruel (p. 43), indifferent (p. 125), and being the annihilator of the village (p. 133). Job likewise accuses God of cruelty (Job 30:21) and injustice (Job 9:20b). Like Job, Berish nonetheless seeks some sort of understanding of God. He seeks God’s face, even if by violence: "I’ll tear off all the masks of Him whose face is hidden!" (p. 103). But he bemoans the fact that a man cannot argue with God: "God is God, and I am only an innkeeper" (p. 42; cf. Job 9:2-4). In the end, Berish refuses to silence his complaint: "And because the end is near I shall shout louder! Because the end is near, I’ll tell Him that He’s more guilty than ever!" (p. 156, cf. Job 31:35-37).

Sam plays the combined role of the satan and Job’s counselors. Sam shares the satan’s actions: "And what if I told you that I am God’s emissary? I visit His creation and bring stories back to Him. I see all things, I watch all men. I cannot do all I want, but I can undo all things" (p. 158; cf. Job 1:7-8, 12). But his main role is to defend God before Berish. Like Job’s counselors, his defense is false (Job 42:7) but convincing. He focuses on God’s higher ways and justice (pp. 132, 123, 157), commitment to peace (p. 124), and His gracious miracles in the midst of calamity (p. 147). He appeals for acquiescence before God: "Endure. Accept. And say Amen" (p. 132). But more than that, "our task is to glorify Him, to praise Him, to love Him" (p. 157). These patient, seemingly faithful words have the tribunal celebrating Sam as a "miracle maker," "a wonder rabbi" (p. 159), "a tzaddik, a Just, a Rabbi, a Master, … a holy man" (p. 160). Wiesel uses the gullibility of the judges under the wiles of Sam as a clarion call to those who accept glib rationales for God’s role in our suffering world.

The critical difference between the Book of Job and Wiesel’s play is that he omits God’s presence. God never speaks for Himself and, therefore, no one responds to Him. Instead of God being the central and controlling character, it is Sam—the satan—who precipitates the trial with the original pogrom, saves the trial by coming to God’s defense, wins the judges over to his argument, and concludes the matter with the final destruction. God’s absence must be Wiesel’s intentional portrayal of his own experience. The rampant evil of the world, epitomized by the Holocaust, demonstrates that the satan is near and destructively active while God is distant and seemingly uncaring or impotent. Wiesel makes this clear when one of the judges points out that someone is missing from the court and Berish sarcastically responds, "Who is that? The defendant? He’s used to it" (p. 70).

Beyond the absence of God, Wiesel also refuses to include a character with a biblical understanding of God. Berish comes closest, but even in the days before his suffering his understanding of God was simplistic and remote: "It happened that He would touch me, on the shoulder, as if to remind me: See, Berish—I exist—I, too, exist! Then I would give Him something just to make Him happy: a little prayer for the Sabbath, an act of contrition for Yom Kippur, a good meal for Passover eve. And so, both of us satisfied, we would then go on with our separate daily routines" (p. 45). Rather than one of love and faith, Berish’s relationship with God was more like that of a master and his dog, with the tossing of an occasional bone. And in his anguish, Berish does not demonstrate Job’s tension between anger and worship. Instead, for Berish the tension is between anger and commitment to his Jewishness (p. 46)—not commitment to the almighty God.

In the end, The Trial of God conveys through drama the struggle of those who suffer yet believe in a powerful and good God. It condemns the inadequate (or even demonic) apologies that seek to justify God. I was disappointed that Wiesel never allows the trial of God to be seriously contested; his characters never honestly wrangle over the difficult problem of suffering amidst God’s power and justice. Wiesel, maybe necessarily, leaves the reader still searching for an adequate explanation of God’s ways. As one of the minstrels asks, "In the entire creation, from kingdom to kingdom and nation to nation, is there not one person to be found, one person to take the side of the Creator? Not one believer to explain His mysteries? Not one teacher to love Him in spite of everything, and love Him enough to defend Him against His accusers? Is there no one in the whole universe who would take the case of the Almighty God?" (p. 109). Wiesel’s absent God mysteriously and inscrutably waits.