The Trial of God

The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod)
Original title	Le procès de Shamgorod tel qu'il se déroula le 25 février 1649
Written by	Elie Wiesel
Characters	Mendel Avrémel Yankel Berish Hanna Maria Priest Sam, the Stranger
Original language	French (Translated into English by Marion Wiesel)
Genre	Drama Purimshpiel
Setting	The fictitious village of Shamgorod in 1649, after a pogrom

The Trial of God (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod) (Le procès de Shamgorod tel qu'il se déroula le 25 février 1649, first published in English in 1979 by Random House) is a play by Elie Wiesel about a fictitious trial ("Din-Toïre", or דין תּורה) calling God as the defendant. Though the setting itself is fictional, and the play's notes indicate that it "should be performed as a tragic farce", the events that he based the story on were witnessed first-hand as a teenager in Auschwitz. The play shares the plot with the otherwise unrelated God on Trial of Frank Cottrell Boyce.

In introducing the setting for the play, Wiesel gives us an idea of the provenance of the din torah / trial concept: "Its genesis: inside the kingdom of night, I witnessed a strange trial. Three rabbis—all erudite and pious men—decided one winter evening to indict God for allowing his children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But nobody cried."Robert McAfee Brown elaborates on this strikingly bleak description:

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.

In his introduction to the play, Robert McAfee Brown notes that Wiesel initially had difficulty in recounting the story in an appropriate form—"It did not work as a novel, it did not work as a play, it did not even work as a cantata." After several attempts, the story was written as a play to be performed around the Jewish festival of Purim. This type of play is commonly known by its Yiddish name Purimschpiel. As Wiesel sets the scene on page one of the play, he notes that it "should be performed as a tragic farce: a Purimschpiel within a Purimschpiel". The Purim play provides the drama with a backdrop of revelry and intense celebration for the Jewish victory of Queen Esther over the genocidal plot of Haman in the book of Esther. Purim calls for masks, feasting, drinking, noisemakers, and the creative re-telling of the Esther victory with enthusiastic jeers at every mention of the character Haman. There is a popularly cited line at Megilah 7b of the Talmud that it is Jewish duty to drink on Purim until one cannot distinguish between the phrases "cursed by Haman" and "blessed by Mordecai", which the character Mendel references in the second act of the play.

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