Mourning the Churban

We don’t understand in our great iniquity, the greatness of cleaving to Hashem and the greatness of the in gathering of the dispersed of Yisroel and thus our awaiting of the Geula (redemption), is merely due to our desire to satiate our thirst and eat its fruits and top be satisfied from its goodness and to exempt ourselves from the yoke of exile. And how can it be that we aren’t embarrassed by our crying and lamenting over our lack of sustenance, for we should cry out, “Where is our Lord”! We have forgotten how bad and how bitter it is that we have been exiled from the table of our Father in Shamayim, (“Heaven”), may his name be blessed. We have forgotten His Torah and the desecration of His Great Name and our wailing day and night is merely over our lack of sustenance. No one considers to mourn over the exile and due to this the Shechinah, (Hashem’s presence), gourds itself in sackcloth and wails and cries over it’s children, that they don’t wail.

Chassam Sofer - Drashos

Exile and Alienation

The Hagodoh states, "We were slaves to Pharaoh". Why does the Hagodoh chose this phrase when it could have said, "We were enslaved to Pharaoh"?
It could be because we were not merely Jews that were enslaved, but our identity as Jews was lost and we thought and acted like slaves, not as children of Yakov Avinu.
A, or perhaps the, symptom of exile is when the exiled nation is perpetually alienated, not a part of the host culture and yet disconnected from it's own culture. It becomes an alien nation, alien to itself and everyone else.
The blacks of America whose ancestors were forcibly removed from their home land face a similar situation, not fully accepted into the pervading white society, but no longer African either.
Can we say that we are wholly Jewish with our Hellenised way of thought? Do we think like Moses or like Hollywood?
Being removed from our land is the means to sever us from our essence. So to a return to the land unaccompanied by Moshiach is just a change of address, (albeit an inherently more spiritual one).
The Pitchei Chotem, (R' Yakov Abuchatzira), takes this idea further by comparing a persons soul to an adult daughter living in her parents house. She's embarrased to live off her parents so she goes out to earn her keep. So, the neshomoh is embarassed to live for free in Shamayim, benefitting from Hashem's Presence, thus it's sent into this world to earn its reward. That doesn't mean that the neshomoh enjoys physicality and material existence. The soul long for spirituality, but the body seeks physical pleasure. We forget that we are neshomohs given a body as a tool. We are alienated from who we really are!
Until the final redemption all that we can do to alliviate our situation is to place Torah and mitzvos above everthing else, to learn Torah properly, (instant connection to Hashem), to pray sincerly and to realise that the Jewish Nation is a spiriual one.