The sages taught that forty years before the Second Temple burned, its destruction had already begun to show in the quiet details only the priests could read.
On Yom Kippur, the lot for the two goats no longer fell consistently on the right, as it had for generations. The crimson band tied outside the Sanctuary stopped turning white — the annual sign that Israel's sins had been forgiven. The westernmost lamp of the menorah, which was meant to stay lit as a witness to the indwelling Shekhinah, began to flicker out. And the great gates of the Temple, so heavy that several priests were needed to move them, began opening by themselves in the night.
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai stood before those self-opening gates and rebuked them as one might rebuke a pupil: "O Temple, Temple, why are you so dismayed? I know what your end will be, for Zechariah son of Iddo has already foretold it — 'Open your doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour your cedars'" (Zechariah 11:1).
The sages are saying something startling. The Temple was a living thing, grieving its own coming death, and the hands of heaven were lifting its gates because no hand on earth was steady enough to keep them shut.
(From the 1901 Hebraic Literature anthology, drawing on Yoma 39b.)