All mourning – even the deepest sorrow – tends, with time, to be forgotten.
With the increasing passage of time, people learn to reconcile themselves to the sorrow and the loss.
This is equally true of both the private mourning of individuals and the communal mourning over the Temple.
So many years have gone by since the destruction of the Temple that the sense of its absence has eroded.
Nowadays, heartache over the destruction of the Temple is found only in one whose soul is attached, even today, to the Temple in its built state.
Only one who “lives” the Temple and the anticipation of its rebuilding and restoration can feel in our time the pain of its absence.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz