The Talmud on Respect for the Temple Site
b. Yevamot 6b
What is fear of the Temple? A person should not enter the Temple Mount with his walking stick, sandals, or wallet or with dust on his feet, and he should not make it a shortcut, and all the more so he [should not] spit [there]. I only kno•w this [applies] during the time when the Temple is standing. How do I know that [the same applies] during the time when the Temple is not standing? The Torah says: You shall keep My Sabbaths and fear My sanctuary (Leviticus 19:30). Just as the keeping that is spoken about with respect to the Sabbath is eternal, so too the fear that is spoken about with respect to the Temple is eternal.
b. Mo‘ed Katan 26a
[It is taught in a baraita:] One tears [one’s garment] on [seeing the ruins of] the Temple and adds [to the tear] on [seeing the destruction of] Jerusalem. They posited a contradiction [with the following teaching from another baraita]: The one who hears and the one who sees are the same: once they reach Mount Scopus, they tear, and then they tear over the Temple by itself and over Jerusalem by itself. There is no difficulty: [the former] is the case in which one encounters the Temple first, and [the latter] is the case in which one encounters Jerusalem first.
Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 2: Emerging Judaism.
