The Subterranean Temple

A D'var Torah for the Three Weeks (leading up to Tisha B'Av) based on a talk of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Is the Ark from the Holy Temple hidden in a subterranean Holy of Holies?

In the thirty centuries since it was first built, the Holy Temple has never ceased to fulfill its fundamental function as the seat of the Divine presence in the world. There were times in which the entire structure stood in all its glory atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, times in which it existed in a diminished form (as in the Second Temple Era), and times in which it was almost entirely destroyed. But a certain part of the Holy Temple has never been disturbed, and there its heart has never ceased to beat. When the “Third” Temple will be built, speedily in our days, and the Ark restored to its above-ground chamber, it will not be a new edifice, or even a “rebuilding,” but a revelation and reasserting of what has been present all along.