Losing my religion: Frank Cottrell Boyce's film about a group of Auschwitz prisoners that put God in the dock
People start to write because they think they can change the world for the better. In the end, you find that it's hard enough to make your writing better. Occasionally, though, you can change something, even if it's only yourself. You probably already know this story: a group of prisoners in Auschwitz convened a rabbinical court, put God himself on trial - and found him guilty. I'm pretty sure now that it's an apocryphal tale, one of those stories that persists because it strikes a chord. It certainly struck a chord with a producer called Mark Redhead, who had been trying to turn the story into a film for almost 20 years by the time he called me in 2005 to write the screenplay.
Three years on, the result, called God On Trial, airs on BBC2 early next month. As courtroom dramas go, the story has its drawbacks: the accused is not going to break down under cross-examination, or confess all in tears. On the other hand, as Redhead pointed out, both the World Trade Centre attacks and the Boxing Day tsunami had seemed - in their different ways - to put God back on the world stage and raise again old questions about justice and suffering. The timing was right, but I wasn't sure about his choice of writer. Nearly any other screenwriter in the country would have been only too happy to Dawkins up some diatribe about the badness of God. But as a Catholic, I'm actually quite fond of him and felt uncomfortable about acting for the prosecution.
Two academic rabbis, Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Jonathan Romaine, changed my mind. They introduced me to 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?"
Although the subject of the guilt of God is universal, when it came to writing I confined myself to imagining this particular trial: the problems of setting up a court in a blockhouse, the kind of arguments that those men might have advanced. I focused on the Covenant, God's special deal with the Jewish people. I thought I was doing this to keep faith with the story - but maybe I was also doing it to distance it from my own spiritual life. The magic of stories, though, is that the more specific you are, the more universal they seem to get. The Covenant turned out to be a really good way of talking about anyone who expects anything from God.
Instead of the usual snappy dialogue, I wrote speeches that ran for pages. To get them right, I had to read the scriptures: the Torah, the Talmud, everything. I assumed that doing so would enrich my own spiritual life. It almost killed it stone dead. I thought I was familiar with much of these texts, but reading them straight through was a different experience. Here was a God who was savage and capricious, who chose favourites then dropped them, who set his people ridiculous tests. And the people! A full account of social etiquette during the time of the book of Genesis would have to include an entry under: What to do when the neighbours come round mob-handed demanding to have sex with your visitors. The answer is: Offer them your virginal daughter instead.
As a writer, I was thrilled by this: free stories! Shocking, bloodthirsty stories of ancient atrocities, stories that almost everyone has forgotten. The screenwriter side of me was happy all day. But the good Catholic side of me was being beaten black and blue. I thought my faith was invulnerable. I've been through family illness. I've witnessed cruelty. I read Darwin all the time and find it feeds my faith. Richard Dawkins makes me want to pray, the same as Homer Simpson makes me want to exercise - for fear that I, too, will end up like him, a whining pub bore with the prose style of an internet conspiracy theorist. The first real challenge to my faith came from reading the scriptures. It may seem deliciously ironic to you, but for me it was a time of a permanent headache and no sleep. I felt that half of me was dying.
I was anxious, too, about the Holocaust setting. George Steiner warned writers against using the Holocaust to give a story spurious extra significance and emotion. So I tried hard to keep the script as theological as possible. All the things a screenwriter is supposed to do, I did the opposite. I was vague about the setting. I tried to avoid creating interesting characters. I gave them no history except where it served the argument. When I was pitching, I said: "It's not about the Holocaust, it's about God."..
Read entire article at Guardian
Three years on, the result, called God On Trial, airs on BBC2 early next month. As courtroom dramas go, the story has its drawbacks: the accused is not going to break down under cross-examination, or confess all in tears. On the other hand, as Redhead pointed out, both the World Trade Centre attacks and the Boxing Day tsunami had seemed - in their different ways - to put God back on the world stage and raise again old questions about justice and suffering. The timing was right, but I wasn't sure about his choice of writer. Nearly any other screenwriter in the country would have been only too happy to Dawkins up some diatribe about the badness of God. But as a Catholic, I'm actually quite fond of him and felt uncomfortable about acting for the prosecution.
Two academic rabbis, Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Jonathan Romaine, changed my mind. They introduced me to 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?"
Although the subject of the guilt of God is universal, when it came to writing I confined myself to imagining this particular trial: the problems of setting up a court in a blockhouse, the kind of arguments that those men might have advanced. I focused on the Covenant, God's special deal with the Jewish people. I thought I was doing this to keep faith with the story - but maybe I was also doing it to distance it from my own spiritual life. The magic of stories, though, is that the more specific you are, the more universal they seem to get. The Covenant turned out to be a really good way of talking about anyone who expects anything from God.
Instead of the usual snappy dialogue, I wrote speeches that ran for pages. To get them right, I had to read the scriptures: the Torah, the Talmud, everything. I assumed that doing so would enrich my own spiritual life. It almost killed it stone dead. I thought I was familiar with much of these texts, but reading them straight through was a different experience. Here was a God who was savage and capricious, who chose favourites then dropped them, who set his people ridiculous tests. And the people! A full account of social etiquette during the time of the book of Genesis would have to include an entry under: What to do when the neighbours come round mob-handed demanding to have sex with your visitors. The answer is: Offer them your virginal daughter instead.
As a writer, I was thrilled by this: free stories! Shocking, bloodthirsty stories of ancient atrocities, stories that almost everyone has forgotten. The screenwriter side of me was happy all day. But the good Catholic side of me was being beaten black and blue. I thought my faith was invulnerable. I've been through family illness. I've witnessed cruelty. I read Darwin all the time and find it feeds my faith. Richard Dawkins makes me want to pray, the same as Homer Simpson makes me want to exercise - for fear that I, too, will end up like him, a whining pub bore with the prose style of an internet conspiracy theorist. The first real challenge to my faith came from reading the scriptures. It may seem deliciously ironic to you, but for me it was a time of a permanent headache and no sleep. I felt that half of me was dying.
I was anxious, too, about the Holocaust setting. George Steiner warned writers against using the Holocaust to give a story spurious extra significance and emotion. So I tried hard to keep the script as theological as possible. All the things a screenwriter is supposed to do, I did the opposite. I was vague about the setting. I tried to avoid creating interesting characters. I gave them no history except where it served the argument. When I was pitching, I said: "It's not about the Holocaust, it's about God."..