God on trial

[struggle4progress]

Neilah - Yom Kippur 5770

... Rabbi Levi Yitzchak lived in Berdichev in the Ukraine in the late 18th Century ... Rabbi Levi Yitzchak interceded at Neilah ... This intervention took a startling form: true to his nickname “the Advocate” – at Neilah, the Chutzpah of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak reached its zenith: he put God on trial. 150 years before Elie Wiesel wrote about Jewish prisoners putting God on trial in Auschwitz for abandoning the Jewish people, Levi Yitzchak put God on trial in the Ukraine. His charge? That God failed to prevent the persecution and economic deprivation of his fellow Jews of the 18th century. And the verdict? Guilty on all the charges ... Link

The Trial of God - More About the Play
Introduction by Robert McAfee Brown

By the time he was fifteen, Elie Wiesel was in Auschwitz ... One night the teacher took Wiesel back to his own barracks, and there, with the young boy as the only witness, three great Jewish scholars-masters of Talmud, Halakhah, and Jewish jurisprudence-put God on trial, creating, in that eerie place, a rabbinic court of law to indict the Almighty.” The trial lasted several nights. Witnesses were heard, evidence was gathered, conclusions were drawn, all of which issued finally in a unanimous verdict: the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, was found guilty of crimes against creation and humankind. And then, after what Wiesel describes as an “infinity of silence,” the Talmudic scholar looked at the sky and said “It’s time for evening prayers,” and the members of the tribunal recited Maariv, the evening service ...

For years Wiesel lived with the tension and dilemma of that memory, pondering how to communicate its despairing solemnity. Nothing “worked.” It did not work as a novel, it did not work as a play ... Finally, he took it even out of the present, resituated it in the past, just after the widespread Chmielnicki pogroms in the years of 1648-49, and turned it into a Purimschpiel ... Link

The Trial of God - More About the Play
The Trial of God, The Trial of Us by Matthew Fox

... This is a play about sin. If anything is sinful, it is the pogroms and the mutilations and abuses and rapes and destruction that pogroms unleash. "Sin," says Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, "is the refusal of humanity to become who we are." If what we really are is an image of God, then sin is our refusal to become that image. When humans fail at this primary task – becoming Godlike, and therefore compassionate and just persons – then God dies. God fails. God gets tried for his/her failure.

The God on trial in this play is the God made after our own image, a God of self-righteous religion, a God of violence, a God of hatred. If the play be understood in light of our mystical tradition of letting go of all things, even of God, then everything depends on our detoxing the way we speak and talk about God, and therefore "judging" or putting on trial the gods we worship or claim to worship. What God truly occupies our hearts? Where are our true treasures and what are they? Is God implicated in the evil that humans perpetrate on one another? ... Link

Wiesel: Yes, we really did put God on trial
By Jenni Frazer, September 19, 2008

The story that rabbis in Auschwitz once decided to put God on trial - and found him guilty - has frequently been assumed to be apocryphal.

But on Monday night, the Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel startled his audience at a Holocaust Educational Trust appeal dinner in London when he declared: "I was there when God was put on trial" ... Jewish Chronicle Online 19 Sept 08

God on trial

... Both stories, that of Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev and that of the Auschwitz inmates, end in the same way. After declaring God's guilt the accusers rise to recite the Kaddish -- the proclamation of God's sovereignty over the universe ... Link

Auschwitz inmates debate suffering's causes in God on Trial
Published: 1/10/2009

... The prisoners are sent back to their barracks, not knowing which side of the room was a death sentence.

Just then, a dozen new arrivals are shoved into the cell block.

Meet the ones who will be sleeping in your beds tomorrow, a guard says with a sneer ...

The debate escalates until one inmate suggests the prisoners put God on trial for abandoning his chosen people ... Toledo Blade 10 Jan 09

From the youtube link: God on Trial is a 2008 BBC/WGBH Boston television play written by Frank Cottrell Boyce ...

[Warpy]

1. I had heard bits and pieces of this over the years

but not the whole thing.

Thanks for a history lesson that should never be forgotten.

[struggle4progress]

2. ... “Where was God” is indeed a deeply religious question, but no less religious is the question

“Where was humanity?” ...
The Trial of God
Link

[deutsey]

3. Very true

For me, the two are inextricably linked. IMHO, it's through cultivating our deepest, most authentic humanity that we experience what people call "god".