My first architectural commission for a public space, Shaare Emeth, was certainly the biggest project I’d had, with the largest budget, so I hired two RISD students from the glass program (Eve Kaplan and Eric Hopkins) to help me with the project. Eve found a passage in the Torah describing the Israelites led through the desert by a column of smoke by day, and a column of fire by night, and we took this as our inspiration. The stained glass was then acid-etched with linear patterns, and the columns of the window visually lead the congregation to the Bema (altar) and the synagogue’s Ner Tamid (eternal light).   — Chihuly