PURGATORY IS A ROMAN A CLEF, AT BEST: Elie Wiesel’s play The Trial of God is amazing, and if you’re reading this blog, you probably should read it. It’s based on a real thing that happened: Wiesel, fifteen years old, was taken under the wing of some fellow Auschwitz prisoners who were rabbis and Talmud scholars. One night they put God on trial, as Job did. God did not deign to appear in the dock as He did with Job. They brought in a verdict of guilty. Then they made their nightly prayers.

The Trial of God changes both the setting and the outcome. We’re in a 17th-c. village which has recently been scourged by a pogrom. This early-modern setting gives a sense of the ways that Jew-hate has existed across millennia. The pretext for the trial is that this night is Purim–the night celebrating the Hebrews’ miraculous victory, recorded in the Book of Esther, against the genocidal villain Haman. A traditional formula states that on this night, Jews must get so drunk that they can’t tell Haman from (the Jewish father and hero) Mordechai. This is carnival for Jews, carnival with a knifepoint as sharp as it should be (yet almost never is) for Christians.

The idea of recasting the Book of Job as a Purimspiel is astonishing. Everything in this play rang true to me. Initially I did wonder about some things said by the local Orthodox Christian priest, in which he explicitly praised Haman and said he was a true Christian–that seemed like making one’s opponents unnecessarily stupid. But actually I think it illustrates how insane Jew-hate makes the haters. A Christian who hates Jews must be open to shockingly absurd reworkings of the Gospels, and Paul’s letters.

I’d recommend that you avoid any edition of this play which includes interpretive essays by Christian theologians. My copy has two, a foreword and an afterword, and both seem rather disgustingly invested in taming the text. There is no way to make this text “safe” for Christians–or Jews. There is no way to make this text an apologia for God. It is not possible, and I’m somewhat shocked that anyone tried.

I do think Wiesel’s play is haunted by the Christian understanding of God, not solely the Jewish understanding. There are several moments where it seems like there’s a deep desire and need to see God Himself suffer. If only one could be certain that God Himself is crucified with the persecuted Jews, then perhaps God might be worthy of love… or perhaps not. Perhaps this would simply make Him yet another clown, another puppet yanked around by the strings of history and hate.

What Wiesel does display so helplessly is the terrible cry, “If there is no God, what do we matter?” If there is no God, why does human suffering matter; why does justice matter, beyond the dumb utilitarian desire to hurt less and enjoy more; why are there Jews? It is the raw fact of the Jews, and nothing else, which stands in the face of atheism in this play. It seems as though the choice is: Either the Jews are absurd, or God is.