injured, she was a temporary employee who was not eligible to be enrolled in PERS. N.J.S.A. 43:15A-7(b). Although we acknowledge that the wording of N.J.S.A. 43:15A-43, in this context, is subject to more than one interpretation, we agree with the PERS board that an employee must be a PERS member at the time of the alleged traumatic event and not merely when the application for the accidental disability pension is filed. We reject the logic of the argument that the Legislature implicitly created as large a class of eligible employees as urged by Smith and we decline the invitation to expansively view the scope of N.J.S.A. 43:15A-43 to cover a public employee based on events that occurred before the employee became a PERS member. See Cha-leff, supra, 188 N.J.Super. at 198, 457 A.2d 33 (<HOLDING>). We also reject Smith’s argument that she
holding that the burden rests upon the party seeking benefits to prove the injury sustained was the result of an accident arising out of and in the course of employment and the rule of liberal construction is not a substitute for the claimants burden of establishing his claim by a preponderance of the evidence holding that the court may not under the guise of statutory construction rewrite a statutory provision holding that an expansive view of the public pension statutes is undesirable because it may threaten the fiscal soundness of the fund and declaring that the availability of benefits should be undertaken by the legislature and not by the courts under the guise of liberal construction holding that a court may not rewrite the insurance contract under the guise of judicial interpretation holding that the courts in the absence of ambiguity should as a general rule confine themselves to a construction of a statute as written and not attempt under the guise of construction to supply omissions or remedy possible defects in the statute or to insert exceptions not made by the legislature