Our temple stained glass windows (conceptualized by our Rabbi and executed by our interior design team of Ana Greene, Mary Goldin, and Rabbi Kendall) represent the five books of Moses. The windows are arranged as Hebrew is written – from right to left.

The first window – The Book of Genesis – begins with creation. You can see that in the upper ring is represented by an abstraction. Here one sees both the chaos and the beginning order of creation. Flowing from this creative moment are what appear to be "beads." These beads or ribbons which continue throughout the windows contain either the significant personalities or the particular quotations which have been chosen to represent the major thrust or significant theological elements within each book of the Torah. You will see descending from creation the names of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people. In the bottom panel, one will find a quotation lifted from the Book of Genesis, which captures an elemental change in the relationship between God and Jacob, and even more so between God and the Jewish people. It reads in English, "No longer will your name be called Jacob, but rather Israel." This is the transformational moment when Jacob becomes Israel – one who has "wrestled with God and prevailed." From this time forth and forever more, the Jewish people will be known as the B’nai Ysrael – the Children of Israel.

The second window – The Book of Exodus – is characterized first in the upper ring by a mountain which is pierced by lightening that certainly could and should represent Sinai, but in the background of Sinai, you will see a pyramid. The Jewish people have its origins in the slavery and bondage under harsh Egyptian taskmasters. The names of the Tribes of Israel – the sons of Jacob flow from a river – and it is the departure from the Nile into the desert of these tribes in the Book of Exodus – which will ultimately shape and mold a "ragtag" collection of disparate tribal peoples into a nation. At the bottom of the second window, you will see the tablets representing the Ten Commandments. The quotation which appears on these tablets, however, is not the Ten Commandments. It goes back to the moment when God, appearing in a bush which burned but was not consumed, finally identifies the Divine persona to Moses. When Moses asks God "who shall I say sent me?" God responds to Moses, "tell them ‘I am what I will be’ sent you." And this characterizes in so many different ways the realities of Jewish theology: that God, in every age, in every time, and in ever place, is the God who will be what is needed to be.

The third window – The Book of Leviticus – contains within it the most difficult abstractions because it is at its core a holy book, a priestly book, one which contains many of the laws, rules, regulations, and customs which go to the very heart of our relationships to others. The bottom quotation that one finds is taken from the "Holiness Codes" in which we are told, "Be holy for I the Lord your God am holy." This is our reading for Yom Kippur afternoon. The question is: what constitutes holiness? As an answer to this query, which is taken from our festival at High Holy Day liturgy, we read "The lord God is merciful and gracious, endlessly patient, loving and true, showing mercy to thousands, to giving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and granting pardon." In other words, the aspects of holiness are to be found in the imitation of God and they manifest themselves on a daily basis in the manner in which we interact with our fellow human beings. In the actual Torah portion, holiness is not described in Promethean terms – as the grand or magnificent gesture – but rather as simple integrity, decency, honesty, loving kindness, and sensitivity. The essential and transcending message of the Holiness Code in Leviticus as captured in our third window is that holiness is within the reach of every individual, irrespective of his or her station.

The fourth window – The Book of Numbers – has in its upper ring what appears to be a tent; in fact, that is the case. Jacob was the first to worship indoors – in a tent. In the bottom panel, you will see a structure, and in fact it is there to represent our synagogue. The quotation, which one finds is actually the curse Balaam invoked against the Jewish people, but when he saw their encampment, the words which came out of his mouth were more of a blessing, "how goodly are your tents, O Jacob, thy dwellings O Israel." This has become the signature sentence which is used to open our worship services, daily and on Shabbat. You will also see in ribbons, which extend from the tent at the top to the sanctuary at the bottom, the only English, which appears in these windows. "My house shall be a house of prayer for all peoples." This English sentence was included because of our congregation’s special outreach to the non-Jewish spouses of some of our members and to the larger community. There are any number of non-Jews who attend our worship services – especially at times of family celebrations as in Bat or Bar Mitzvah services – and there is absolutely nothing within the precincts of the sanctuary which they would find either offensive or trammeling on their own theological sensitivities. This quotation goes directly to the universal character of our Judaism.

The final window is the Book of Deuteronomy. You will see in the top circle a Torah scroll which for all intents and purposes unravels to the bottom and extending from that Torah scroll to the bottom are all of the celebratory and ceremonial occasions, that are unique to Judaism that help define who we are as a people. The Shabbat services, the three Festivals of Judaism, the High Holy Days, and two modern celebrations and commemorations, Israel Independence Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day, find their way into the calculus of our ritual, ceremonial, and celebratory life. In the bottom panel, you will see a quote from Deuteronomy, Chapter 6, which in many ways captures the essence of those things that are central to Jewish identity. Our Torah tells us in that chapter that if "we observe God’s rituals, commandments statutes, and ordinances that the Holy One will give to us a land which flows with milk and honey." Immediately after that statement comes the "watch words of our faith" in our Sh’ma: Hear Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one." Immediately following the Sh’ma comes the following statement: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your being." Here you have the confluence – which by no means is accidental – of Jewish practice, the centrality of the land of Israel, the belief in one God, the uniqueness of the Jewish people, and the practice of Judaism, which begins with the love of God and ends with teaching these things diligently to our children.

You will see running through the center panel what appears to be a stream. The general consensus was that there ought to be a water motif that found its way into these windows. First, there is a tremendous amount of water imagery and birth imagery in the Torah, but second and perhaps most importantly, this is Temple Beit HaYam, the temple by the sea, and what better way to capture our identity than to include such imagery in these five magnificent windows – unique in all the world and one of our most precious possessions that so enrich our worship and our sanctuary.

The Sandra Frey Rich Memorial Chapel – early in the design process, it was Rabbi Kendall’s belief that we needed some extra "sacred space" in our congregation. Having served in synagogues where memorial plaques were in the main sanctuary, the Rabbi urged that we create a memorial room in which families might gather in quiet meditation, and so this chapel was born. There are five windows in our sanctuary for the Five Books of Moses; there are six windows in the Memorial Chapel to represent the six million lost in the Shoah. Conceptualized and designed by our Rabbi, you will find a considerable amount of Shoah imagery. The upper panels – again read from right to left as is Hebrew – begin with glass that is shattered and – a Star of David that is terribly fragmented. This certainly could be an emblem of Kristallnacht, that frightening and portentious night of November 9th, 1938, in which a state sponsored pogrom destroyed many of the synagogues in Germany and Austria and set in motion the wheels which led to the "final solution." As you from right to left, you will see that the star comes together, and the shattered glass begins to disappear until we finally reach the final panel where the star is whole and the glass is not shattered. This symbolizes two sensitive and observations: The first is that the Holocaust took away an entire culture and civilization; nonetheless the Jewish people survived – tattered, bruised, beaten, and terribly diminished, but nonetheless, survivors still. Since this is a memorial chapel designed not only to commemorate the Holocaust but also to serve as a place for people to mourn their individual losses, these upper panels might also underscore the passage of time. With time, it is not that we miss anyone any less or are less mournful, but time does allow us the opportunity to place a life into some kind of perspective so that we can focus on not just what we have lost but also on what we have had.

The lower panels depict a Torah scroll. This is a Torah scroll that has been torn and pierced, and it does not contain any of the classical Jewish writings that one finds in the Five Books of Moses. Instead, it contains a prayer for the martyrs of our people. You will see in the second panel a yellow star with the word "yizkor," the word that is traditionally used to designate remembrance but also in this particular instance, we remember the yellow stars which our people were forced to wear during the Shoah. The Torah almost has a bloody character to it. The deep reds come very close to suggest that the Torah is bleeding from the abuse that it is receiving from the hands of those who are "haters of Israel." The Torah is also punctured by barbed wire, certainly reminiscent of the fences which surrounded the camps. At the bottom of the first five panels, you will see smoke stacks. They were inspired by Nellie Sachs, the Nobel prize-winning author and poet whose work, "O the Chimneys," captured the despair and the loss of our people. The names of the camps where the machinery of death ran day and night, attempting to extinguish all that God cherished, can be found in the lower panels. If you look to the sixth and last panel, you will not only see a whole and complete Star of David that sits in glass that is not shattered, you will also see a Torah scroll that is no longer pierced and bloody but complete again. You will also see that the barbed wire has morphed into a living vine. Nothing would capture more eloquently the survival of our people than this vine, which trails off beyond our line of vision and this Torah, which in spite of the predations of so many implacable foes, nonetheless remains whole and complete and carries us into the future.