Les caprices

« 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. »

"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."

"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."

The Guardian