“The day is short” is a discovery I make daily.
I wake up in the morning, and within a very short time I discover that it is midnight or 2:00 a.m.
And I wonder: what has happened to that day?
Where did it evaporate?
Every Rosh Hashanah I regret that there is no double leap year, with a second month of Elul.
Had there been a second Elul, I might have been able to finish something before Rosh Hashanah.
But there is no second Elul, and again I feel that I am short of so much time.
The day is short, amazingly short, and it ends with tremendous speed, and thus weeks and months and years go by.
“The work is great”, too, and for some reason it does not seem to diminish as I keep working at it. And I can attest that the other paragraphs of the Mishna also hold true for me. This is my private view:
But In addition to the subjective “short day” of an individual life, there is also the objective “short day.”
In the past, this was not so obvious; but now, everyone can see how the day is not only short, but also becoming shorter and shorter.
Processes that we assessed would take dozens of years are now unfolding within an exceedingly short time, and the world is trembling and changing speedily.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz