According to the prayer books Avodas Yisroel and Beis Yaakov, we should recite Psalm 74 on the fast day of the 10^th of Tevet - a day which commemorates the siege of Jerusalem and the subsequent destruction of the First Temple. A quick glance at the opening verses of the psalm, which describe the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish People's despair, is enough to see why this psalm was chosen.

In the middle of the psalm, however, the psalmist suddenly switches gears for a verse and gives advice to God:

Why do You withdraw You hand -
 Your right hand?
From the midst of Your bosom,
 remove it! (74:11)

He then begins to sing God's praises. God is called a King Who shatters the sea and dries up the rivers; makes the sun and moon and has control over day and night; establishes the seasons of summer and winter. The psalmist concludes by calling upon God to remember the insults done to His Name by the enemy and deliver His people from the enemy's hands.

It's all very nice, except for two problems.

Firstly, when God wants to remind us of the special relationship He has with the Jewish People, He doesn't refer to Himself, in the Torah, as the Creator of heaven and earth. He reminds us that He is the One Who took us out of Egypt.

The reason for this, our Sages explain, is because our understanding of the concept of Creation is too limited. We really have no way of fully comprehending the miracle of Creation, and so God as Creator of All is really beyond our comprehension. However, a God Who delivers slaves out of bondage and turns them into a free people is a concept that we can easily relate to.

When times are good, we can - and should - examine and praise God's handiwork in the natural world. But when the Jewish people are in trouble, we're supposed to pull out our "trump card" and remind God of the miracles He performed for us at the time of the Exodus. So why, when the Temple is burning and the Jewish people are in despair, does the psalmist choose to focus on the miracles of Creation, instead?

Second, this psalm is called a Maskil, which is one of ten types of song used in the Book of Songs. Maskil comes from the word sechel, which means intelligence, and so the psalmist is telling us that there is something we should learn from a careful reading of his words.

But what is he telling us? That since God is All Powerful, He could - and should - punish the wrongdoers and protect the innocent? True, the psalmist has eloquently stated his case, but how do we know his argument has been received and accepted? By the psalm's end we know what God should do, but how do we know that God will do it?

To find the answer to these questions, we have to take a closer look at the psalm's concluding verses:

Remember this - how the enemy reviled God, and the degenerate nation blasphemed Your Name.

Don’t give to the wild beast Your turtledove, the life of Your poor, do not forget forever.

Look upon the covenant, because the earth's dark places are filled with violence.

Don't let the oppressed ones turn back in shame, let the poor and the destitute praise Your Name.

Arise, God, take up Your grievance, remember Your insults from the degenerate all day long.

Don't forget the voice of Your foes, the tumult of Your opponents which rises always (74,18:23).

How, one might ask, could such a tone of voice possibly be effective? And then the penny drops.

"Remember…" "Don't forget…" "Remember…" "Don't forget…"

 Somewhere, we've heard this combination of "Remember/Don't forget" before.

"Somewhere" is Deuteronomy 25, 17:19, the three verses we read on Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance:

     How he met you by the way, and smote all
            the feeble ones behind you,
            when you were tired and faint;
            and he feared not God.

     Therefore it shall be, when the Lord Your God
            has given you rest from all your enemies
            round about, in the land which the Lord
            Your God gives you for an inheritance
            to possess it, blot out the remembrance
            of Amalek from under heaven;
            do not forget.

In these verses, Moses, at the command of God, is telling the Jewish People to remember their arch foe Amalek and what he did to them. Why? Because - and don't forget this - when the proper time comes, Amalek will be destroyed and his memory will be wiped out.

There have been many Amaleks throughout Jewish history - nations that have wanted to destroy us. Since the destruction of the First Temple, we have been attacked and battered by Haman and the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Spanish Inquisition, the Pogroms, the Holocaust and now the Arab wars.

It's been a very, very long 2,000 years. In fact, it seems like an eternity, and it's hard to understand why we needed to go through all this suffering. No, it's not just hard - it's beyond our comprehension.

And now we can begin to understand why the psalmist calls upon God the Creator, and not God in His role as freer of slaves.

The slavery in Egypt was very difficult and the Egyptians were very cruel - and yet we do not have a command to blot out the memory of the Egyptians. In fact, we are told we must remember always the kindness the Egyptians initially showed us when Jacob and his sons went down to Egypt.

The reason for our ambivalence towards our experience in Egypt is because that time really was a mixed blessing. On a physical level, we suffered greatly. Yet during that time our spiritual resolve as a people was strengthened, and we went from being a small tribe to a nation capable of being a vessel to receive God's Torah. When God took us out of Egypt, there was not only an end to the suffering - there was an end point, a meaning that could put the suffering into perspective: we were now God's Chosen People with a unique role to play in the world.

Part of our ability to appreciate God as the One Who relieves the suffering is tied to our ability to understand that there can be a benefit to experiencing this suffering. If we see only the pain, however, we may become angry at God and want to sever the relationship with Him (God forbid). We can't appreciate God as the freer of slaves, if we are stuck at the point where we are angry at God for causing the slavery in the first place.

It is this crisis in faith that every Jew has had to look squarely in the face since the destruction of the Second Temple - and especially since the Holocaust. A little suffering, we can understand - but 2,000 years of torture and insult? The sheer magnitude of the suffering has moved into a realm that is beyond our comprehension

Therefore, Psalm 74 is telling us that during times when we are unable to see a meaning to our suffering - when we are experiencing a deep crisis of faith - our concept of God has to move from "Freer of Slaves" into a different realm.

When logic dictates that after 2,000 years there is no hope of ever returning to our land in peace and rebuilding our Temple, we have to turn to the One Who is beyond logic and time and can do the impossible. We must turn to God Who can create heaven and earth out of no-thing and bring peace to a world filled with violence.

But what gives us this right, after 2,000 years of waiting, to hang on to this hope that God will finally look down from His high places and bless us with the blessing of peace?

In a word, the Torah. It is God, Himself, who has commanded us to remember Amalek, and not forget that one day Amalek will be destroyed, the Temple will be rebuilt and we will finally know peace in our land.

And so the psalmist is telling us, who live 2,000 years after the destruction of the Temple and the beginning of the exile, not to give up hope. Our prayers will be answered. How do we know? Because we are calling out to Him with the very same words that He, Himself, taught us to say:

     Remember what
          Amalek/Babylonia/Persia/Greece/
          Rome/Europe/Ishmael
           did to us;
     Don't forget the voice of Your foes

     Remember Your promise to redeem us;
     Don't forget us forever.