As part of my role on the faculty at Queens University, I am often asked to share a reflection to open a faculty meeting. Here’s my reflection from our March 12, 2025, College of Arts and Sciences meeting.

A reflection on time… actually on four significant times of last and this week.

Our Islamic siblings are in the midst of Ramadan, one of the holiest times of their year. Fasting, charity, community, improving oneself. We are all invited to an Interfaith Iftar tomorrow night.

Tomorrow evening at sunset the Jewish community starts its cerebration of a festival called Purim. It is a Halloween or Mardi Gras-like holiday of sorts where we wear costumes and read the book of Esther, remembering how we were saved as a Jewish people from a genocidal plot aimed against us. In response, we celebrate our freedom and survival raucously and freely – even getting drunk in our synagogues.

Spring Break was last week, the full and long breath we take and time we enjoy before we are confronted with the last long stretch of the semester and of the academic year.

Our US is catching up to daylight saving time leaving us a bit exhausted, disoriented and dazed. But as the days pass we adjust.

Solemn time. Celebratory time. Serious time of teaching and guiding the next generation. Daylight saving time.

My father, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, wrote that, “Time flies like a shadow… not like the shadow of a house, so the Talmud [a monumental book of Jewish wisdom] reminds us, nor like the shadow of a tree, but like the shadow of a bird in flight.

Yet is it really time that flies? Is not time, like space, an aspect of infinity? It was, it is, it will remain.”

It mocks all of our efforts to encompass it, with our feeble instruments, our clocks and calendars, with their petty markings of hours and of seasons.

No, time does not fly… We fly. Our journey through time is a flight, and it is speedily gone.”

Sacred time. Celebratory time. Simple time of the semester. Daylight saving time.

May we savor it. May we make the most of it — before it is gone from our grasp.

Photo by David Kennedy on Unsplash.com.