It is the rallying cry of atheists and a familiar challenge to the faithful. If there is a God, why does he allow such terrible suffering? The BBC’s single episode drama, God on Trial, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, grapples compellingly for 85 minutes with this question. Many of us will spend a lifetime wondering, and – not to spoil it – you won’t necessarily get an answer here. But that doesn’t mean the question isn’t worth asking.
Set in an Auschwitz blockhouse, a group of Jews – half of whom know they will die the next day – decide God should be interrogated. By allowing the Holocaust, has God broken the Covenant He made to protect and care for His people?
Approximating a Rabbinical court in the space between bunks, the prisoners attempt order: witnesses are called, judges ruminate and the accused, obviously, remains infuriatingly silent.
This is incredibly cerebral stuff for TV, dialogue-heavy and almost entirely set in one claustrophobic space. I wondered whether Boyce could pull it off. He does, mainly because he is such a good writer who has so obviously interrogated his own faith and that of the characters in the film in order to write the script. He’s also great with one-liners: “Do you know what a God who’s not personal is? It’s weather”, one character points out, in a very rare moment of humour.
An outstanding cast is the other reason the drama works so well. Rupert Graves, Anthony Sher, Stellan Skarsgard, Stephen Dillane and the ubiquitous Dominic Cooper demand our attention and our immediate, overwhelming empathy.
There are many witnesses, each unravelling an onion skin to get to the question – who is God? What is man? There is despair, and hope. A Professor Schmidt, trying hard to comfort his fellow inmates, suggests, “What if those who survived this will be a holy remnant and will live in an age of wisdom, understanding and knowledge?” It’s a poignant line to hear in our own age, the age of Darfur and Iraq and mass rape in the Congo.
At some point the question of free will is raised. Judaism and Christianity maintain that God allows humans the freedom to make choices in their lives; by definition that means some humans will make destructive decisions that will cause suffering. This argument is simply inadequate for many of the inmates; the injustice of being on the receiving end of someone else’s free will is too real: “That officer had a choice, not me”, says one. “Where was my free will?”
The drama is not perfect. The prisoners’ one guard is occasionally weakly scripted. Cottrell Boyce seems – whether knowingly or not – to have borrowed from other sources – Sophie’s Choice and the graphic novel Maus, in particular. But this can be forgiven in a script that is so brave, so adventurous, in confronting the true mysteries of our existence.
And although the prisoners end by finding God guilty, they also recognize that in some way the debate itself, the trial, is a kind of prayer. As Bottrell points out in a fascinating article for The Guardian, there is
a long Jewish tradition of wrangling with God, going right back to Abraham bargaining with him over the destruction of Sodom, and forward to Elie Weisel’s famous declaration that God was hanged on the gallows in Auschwitz. Here were people talking to God on a frequency that wasn’t on my dial. The trial of God would not have been some blasphemous aberration, but something in the tradition of the psalms, the Book of Job and even Christ’s terrible accusing cry from the cross: “Why have you forsaken me?”
God on Trial is available on the BBC i-player here until Wednesday 10th of September.
