We usually pray Yom Kippur in Campus Center Room 375, some years in Assembly Hall on 2nd floor. But no matter, given UAlbany’s main campus design – nearly all of its rooms have this same feature: MANY THIN WINDOWS.
The rooms at UAlbany are full of windows. Whole walls of windows. But the windows are not a broad expansive picture-window, instead they are the tall thin narrow windows, one after another. Small windows, but a great many of them.
Here we are on Yom Kippur facing these windows all day long. What’s the message?
Windows are openings, apertures, they are symbolic of opportunity.
Sometimes we seek the big game-changing opportunities, those 180 degree shifts, those life-changing moments. Those are the big giant windows.
But UAlbany is short on those, and big on smaller thinner windows. Small, but many. Each one is a smaller leap, a smaller degree of change. But cumulatively? It’s a lot of window.
And Judaism celebrates that, too. One Mitzvah at a time, each finite moment and action endowed with infinite significance.