Michael Fox
Special to JTNews
God’s existence and his responsibilities to the chosen people are abstract concepts to some people. For others, faith is a matter of the greatest importance.
Both ends of the spectrum have been represented at every dark juncture in history. In our own time, when the survival of the Jewish people is not in question, the fundamental spiritual dialectic still applies.
The audacious, riveting and altogether first-rate BBC-TV production “God on Trial” places the debate in that most freighted of locations: A barracks at Auschwitz. The charge levied against God is breach of contract, said contract being the covenant God made with the Israelites.
British screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce’s pithy script, abetted by the kinetic direction of Andy DeEmmony, merges the gravity of history and timeless, universal questions into a tour de force of intellectual prowess and emotional immediacy. Line up your libations beforehand, because you’ll be far too engrossed to leave the set for even a moment.
The 90-minute piece makes a calculated effort to transcend the limits of a TV play as well as to bridge the gulf of 60-some years. It begins with a tour bus pulling up to the gates of Auschwitz and disgorging its passengers. The film periodically cuts back to their trip through the camp, providing a point of connection and identification that is more accessible to us than the prisoners in Auschwitz.
They are a shrewd bunch, these beaten-up but not-quite-beaten-down Jews. The veterans face their inevitable fate with pragmatism and dignity, and the newcomers quickly discern that illusions are a luxury no one in Auschwitz can afford.
The trial is really a debate that logically and artfully encompasses almost every philosophical, theological, spiritual, historical and practical implication. A scholar quotes and interprets scripture, for example, but that evidence is balanced both by the emotional experience of a Russian Jew forced by an SS officer to choose which of his three sons would live and by a Parisian physicist eloquently representing all secular, rational and scientific Jews.
“God on Trial” likewise grapples with the notion of Jewish identity from several points of view.
“We are not being martyred for our faith but for our race, and our ancestry,” one character argues, with an unflinching clarity characteristic of the dialogue.
The marvelous script doesn’t shy away from all kinds of tough-minded arguments, such as finding precedents for God’s destruction in the flood that only Noah and his family escaped or the annihilation of the Egyptian soldiers in the Red Sea. In fact, perhaps he was never a just or good God but only happened to be on our side — until 1933.
One man makes the case that the Jews broke the covenant. And another man proposes that the sacrifice and “purification” of the Holocaust is a requisite for the Jews’ return to the land of Israel.
It is a tribute to Boyce’s writing and the first-rate, committed cast — including Stellan Skarsgard, Antony Sher, Stephen Dillane, Rupert Graves, Eddie Marsan and Dominic Cooper — that we consistently see the prisoners as suffering human beings grappling with God and the Holocaust rather than as cardboard mouthpieces for a range of positions.
Part of that urgency derives from a selection process made a few hours ago — but not yet carried out — to clear room in the barracks for the group of new arrivals. While death always lurks in Auschwitz, it has crept into the bunks of several of the inmates.
“God on Trial” is that rare work that speaks to everyone, from rabbis with a thousand sermons under their keyboards to 8-year-olds forming their first questions, and from Orthodox Jews to atheistic “cultural” Jews. It is satisfyingly cerebral, but unfailingly accessible.
The film also has an emotional undercurrent, but it does not aspire to bathos. Courtrooms are about evidence and the law, not sentiment. As for the film itself, the verdict could not be clearer: “God on Trial” is great, great television.
“God on Trial” airs at 9 p.m. Sun., Nov. 9 on KCTS 9 (Seattle), KYVE 47 (Yakima), KBTC (Tacoma) and at 8 p.m. on KSPS 7 (Spokane) as part of PBS’ “Masterpiece Contemporary” drama series.