Is 'Star Trek' Founded on Jewish Principles?

 

“JEWISH ROOTS OF ‘STAR TREK’ ARE EXPLORED BY EXHIBITION”
by Adam Nagourney 

[The following article appeared in the “Arts” section of the New York Times on 5 January 2022.  In it, Adam Nagourney explains how Sheri Bernstein, the director of the Skirball Cultural Center, an educational institution in Los Angeles, California, devoted to sustaining Jewish heritage and American democratic ideals, and Jessie Kornberg, the president of the center, justified hosting an exhibit of Star Trek memorabilia.

[I confess that, with one salient exception, I find the argument that Star Trek, of which I am a great fan (in college, I never missed an episode of the original series on the big color set at the frat house), is somehow infused with Jewish thought and wisdom hard to buy.

[Yes, the two stand-out leads in the show, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, were both Jewish, but how much sway would two actors have over the series’ content?  Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator and guiding influence, wasn’t Jewish.  If there’s any crossover, I’d think it was coincidental, or the consequence of the humanist values with which Roddenberry imbued the project that coincided with fundamental Jewish humanism.

[The one exception to which I alluded above is the hand gesture Nimoy invented for the Vulcan greeting.  That came directly and specifically from a symbolic religious gesture from a particular Jewish blessing.  It went viral even in the days long before social media and is almost universally recognized and even imitated.  But is that enough to assert that Star Trek has Jewish roots?

[Read Nagourney’s presentation of the Skirball’s exegesis and decide for yourself.]

This show, which has plenty of artifacts to delight Trekkies, notes the origins of the Vulcan salute.

LOS ANGELES — Adam Nimoy gazed across a museum gallery filled with “Star Trek” stage sets, starship replicas, space aliens, fading costumes and props (think phaser, set to stun). The sounds of a beam-me-up transporter wafted across the room. Over his shoulder, a wall was filled with an enormous photograph of his father — Leonard Nimoy [1931-2015], who played Spock on the show — dressed in his Starfleet uniform, his fingers splayed in the familiar Vulcan “live long and prosper” greeting.

But that gesture, Adam Nimoy noted as he led a visitor through this exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center [Los Angeles], was more than a symbol of the television series that defined his father’s long career playing the part-Vulcan, part-human Spock. It is derived from part of a Hebrew blessing that Leonard Nimoy first glimpsed at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Boston as a boy and brought to the role.

The prominently displayed photo of that gesture linking Judaism to Star Trek culture helps account for what might seem to be a highly illogical bit of programming: the decision by the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center known mostly for its explorations of Jewish life and history, to bring in an exhibition devoted to one of television’s most celebrated sci-fi shows.

But walking through the artifacts Adam Nimoy recalled how his father, the son of Ukrainian Jews who spoke no English when they arrived, had said he identified with Spock, pointing out that he was “the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise.”

Jewish values and traditions were often on the minds of the show’s writers as they dealt with issues of human behavior and morality, said David Gerrold, a writer whose credits include “The Trouble with Tribbles,” one of the most acclaimed “Star Trek” episodes [Season 2, Episode 15; 29 Dec. 1967], which introduces the crew to a cute, furry, rapidly reproducing alien life form.

“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” Gerrold said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”

[The Talmud, which translates as ‘instruction’ or ‘learning,’ is the collection of commentaries on biblical texts that forms, with the Torah, the foundation for the theology and religious law of Judaism.  It dates from between the 4th century to the 6th century CE.  The Torah is the law on which Judaism is founded (torah is Hebrew for ‘law’).  This law is contained in the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch or the Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).]

That connection was not explicit when the show first aired. And a stroll through the exhibition, which covers the original television show as well as some of the spinoffs and films that came to encompass the “Star Trek” industry, mainly turns up items that are of interest to “Star Trek” fans. There is a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode, a Klingon disrupter from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” [second series, 1987-94], and a display of tribbles.

To some extent, the choice of this particular exhibition — “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” — to help usher the Skirball back into operation after a Covid shutdown reflects the imperatives museums everywhere are facing as they try to recover from a pandemic that has been so economically damaging. “These days — honestly, especially after the pandemic — museums are looking for ways to get people through the door,” said Brooks Peck, who helped create the show for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “Museums are struggling to find an audience and are looking for a pop culture hook.”

It seems to have worked. The “Star Trek” exhibition has drawn 12,000 attendees in its first two months here, a robust turnout given that the Skirball is limiting sales to 25 percent of capacity.

“This has been bringing in new people, no question,” said Sheri Bernstein, the museum director. “Attendance is important for the sake of relevance. It’s important for us to bring in a diverse array of people.”

Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said that the center had been drawn by the parallels between Judaism and the television show. “Nimoy’s Jewish identity contributed to a small moment which became a big theme,” she said. “We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”

The intersections between the television series and Judaism begin with its two stars, Nimoy and William Shatner [b. 1931], who played Capt. James T. Kirk. “These are two iconic guys in outer space who are Jewish,” said Adam Nimoy. And it extends to the philosophy that infuses the show, created by Gene Roddenberry [1921-91], who was raised a Southern Baptist but came to consider himself a humanist, according to his authorized biography.

Those underlying connections are unmistakable for people like Nimoy, 65, a television director who is both a devoted “Star Trek” fan and an observant Jew: He and his father often went to services in Los Angeles, and Friday night Sabbath dinners were a regular part of their family life.

Nimoy found no shortage of Jewish resonances and echoes in the exhibition, which opened in October [7 Oct. 2021] and closes on Feb. 20. He stopped at a costume worn by a Gorn, a deadly reptilian extraterrestrial who was in a fight-to-the-death encounter with Kirk [“Arena,” Season 1, Episode 18; 19 Jan. 1967].

“When he gets the Gorn to the ground, he’s about to kill him,” Nimoy recounted. “The Gorn wants to kill Kirk. But something happens. Instead he shows mercy and restraint and refuses to kill the Gorn.”

“Very similar to the story of Joseph,” Nimoy said, referring to the way Joseph, in the biblical book of Genesis, declined to seek retribution against his brothers for selling him into slavery.

Leonard Nimoy died in 2015 at the age of 83. Shatner, who is 90 and recently became the oldest person to go into space [13 Oct. 2021 aboard a Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule, built by Jeff Bazos], declined to discuss the exhibition. “Unfortunately Mr. Shatner’s overcommitted production schedule precludes him from taking on any additional interviews,” said his assistant, Kathleen Hays.

The Skirball Cultural Center is set on 15 acres, about 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles [in the Sepulveda Pass].

The exhibition ran for about two years in Seattle after opening in 2016 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original “Star Trek” TV show’s [8 Sept.] 1966 [U.S.] debut. (That version was on NBC for three seasons [1966-69; now commonly known as Star Trek: The Original Series].) The exhibition had been intended to tour, but those plans were cut short when the pandemic began to close museums across the country.

The exhibition was assembled largely from the private collection of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and founder of the Museum of Pop Culture, who died in 2018.

Peck said he wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the series with an exhibition that explored the outsize influence the television show had on American culture. “The answer that I am offering is that ‘Star Trek’ has endured and inspired people because of the optimistic future it presents — the good character of many of its characters,” Peck said. “They are characters that people would like to emulate.”

“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” he said. “Happily it completely worked out. I had always hoped that Skirball could take it. Skirball’s values as an institution so align with the values of ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘Star Trek’ community.”

Bernstein, the Skirball director, said the exhibition seemed a particularly good way to help bring the museum back to life.

“There was never a better time to present this show than now,” she said. “We very much liked the idea of reopening our full museum offerings with a show that was about inspiring hope. A show that promised enjoyment.”

By spring, ‘Star Trek’ will step aside for a less surprising offering, an exhibition about Jewish delis [“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: The Jewish Deli; no dates announced], but for now, the museum is filled both with devotees of Jewish culture, admiring a Torah case from China, and Trekkies, snapping pictures of the captain’s chair that Kirk sat in aboard the Enterprise.

“There is no such thing as too much ‘Star Trek,’” Scott Mantz, a film critic, said as he began interviewing Adam Nimoy after a recent screening at the museum of “For the Love of Spock,” a 2016 documentary Nimoy had made about his father. A long burst of applause rose from his audience.

[Adam Nagourney covers West Coast cultural affairs for the New York Times.  He was previously the Los Angeles bureau chief and served eight years as the chief national political correspondent.  He is the co-author of Out for Good, a history of the modern gay rights movement.

[For the incipient Trekkie, there are five television series in the Star Trek franchise: Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-69), ST: The Next Generation (1987-94), ST: Deep Space Nine (1993-99), ST: Voyager (1995-2001), and ST: Enterprise (2001-05).

[There are also streaming series: ST: Discovery (2017-present), ST: Picard (2020-present), and ST: Strange New Worlds (upcoming in May 2022).  There have also been animated series and 13 films released between 1979 and 2016, with several more in production.

[This tally doesn’t include the countless documentaries, books, comics, magazines, and items of merchandise, plus the parodies and fan products that pop up all the time.]

*  *  *  *
“THE JEWISH ROOTS OF LEONARD NIMOY AND ‘LIVE LONG AND PROSPER’”
by Abby Ohlheiser

[The following article is from a Weblog post of the Washington Post on 27 February 2015.  Abby Olheiser reports on an interview Leonard Nimoy did with a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of books in the Yiddish language and the culture and history those books represent.  I’ve reposted it on Rick On Theater because the explanation provided in Adam Nagourney’s New York Times piece above concerning the invention by Leonard Nimoy of the Vulcan greeting gesture is incomplete and I wanted to fill it out.]

Leonard Nimoy first saw what became the famous Vulcan salute, “live long and prosper,” as a child, long before “Star Trek” even existed. The placement of the hands comes from a childhood memory, of an Orthodox Jewish synagogue service in Boston.

The man who would play Spock saw the gesture as part of a blessing, and it never left him. “Something really got hold of me,” Nimoy said in a 2013 interview with the National Yiddish Book Center.

Nimoy, who died on Friday [27 February 2015 at 83], spoke about the Jewish roots of the famous gesture for an oral history project documenting the lives of Yiddish speakers, of which Nimoy is one.

At the beginning of the interview, Nimoy talked about his childhood in Yiddish. He was born in Boston, but his parents came from a village in what is now Ukraine [Iziaslav], where his father worked as a barber. “My first language was English,” Nimoy told the interviewer in Yiddish, “but I needed to speak Yiddish with my grandparents.”

A disclosure: Years ago, as a college student, I worked part-time at the National Yiddish Book Center, which is located on my alma mater’s campus [Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts].

Although Nimoy never hid his upbringing from the world, my short experience there is why Nimoy’s work to preserve the language of his childhood came to mind today. I reached out to the Center, which explained that Nimoy started recording Jewish short stories, from Eastern Europe, in 1995, for a radio show hosted by the Center. He funded another project to record Yiddish stories and distribute them to children.

“Toward the end of his life, he called for increased efforts to teach Yiddish to a new generation,” Aaron Lansky, the center’s president, added in an email. “I’m not sure any Vulcan ever spoke a more geshmak (flavorful) Yiddish. He will be missed.” [The German word for ‘taste’ is Geschmack; the adjective ‘tasty’ or ‘flavorful’ is geschmackvoll or geschmacklich.]

Nimoy’s incorporation of the blessing speaks particularly poignantly about the permeable boundaries between Spock and Nimoy himself.

“This is the shape of the letter shin [ש],” Nimoy said in the 2013 interview, making the famous “V” gesture. The Hebrew letter shin, he noted, is the first letter in several Hebrew words, including Shaddai (a name for God), Shalom (the word for hello, goodbye and peace) and Shekhinah, which he defined as “the feminine aspect of God who supposedly was created to live among humans.”

The Shekhinah, Nimoy has said, was also the name of the prayer he participated in as a boy that inspired the salute. The prayer, meant to bless the congregation, is named after the feminine aspect of God, Nimoy explained in a 2012 post on the “Star Trek” site. “The light from this Deity could be very damaging. So we are told to protect ourselves by closing our eyes,” he wrote in the blog.

“They get their tallits over their heads [tallit (plural in Hebrew and Yiddish is tallot) is a fringed prayer shawl worn by religious Jews], and they start this chanting,” Nimoy says in the 2013 interview, “And my father said to me, ‘don’t look’.” At first he obliged, but what he could hear intrigued him. “I thought, ‘something major is happening here.’ So I peeked. And I saw them with their hands stuck out from beneath the tallit like this,” Nimoy said, showing the “V” with both his hands. “I had no idea what was going on, but the sound of it and the look of it was magical.”

After witnessing the ritual all those years ago, Nimoy practiced making the “V” with his fingers as a child. He “never dreamed” he would one day make the gesture so publicly and repeatedly as an adult.

That was, he said, until a “Star Trek” script required his character Spock to go home to Vulcan [“Amok Time,” Season 2, Episode 1; 15 Sept. 1967]. “It was the first time we’d seen other Vulcans, other people of my race, so I was hoping to find some touching that could help develop the Vulcan sociology,” Nimoy said.

“I think we should have some special greeting that Vulcans do,” Nimoy recalled saying. He suggested the prayer gesture from his childhood.

“Boy,” he said, “that just took off. It just touched a magic chord.

He noted that “most people to this day still don’t know” the history of the greeting, although he repeatedly and enthusiastically shared its origin.

Laughing, Nimoy revealed the best part of it all: “People don’t realize they’re blessing each other with this!”

[Abby Ohlheiser covered digital culture for the Washington Post.  She left the Post in March 2020.

[A few comments on the WaPo article and the interview with Nimoy:

[Like Nimoy, my father (1918-96) was the son of a Ukrainian immigrant.  My paternal grandfather, Jacob, was born in the small city of Uman in 1890 (d. 1963) and came to the U.S. as a child with his parents and grandparents in 1900.  (My dad’s mother was born in Latvia in 1896.)

[In Dad’s family, the language of his grandparents’ household was German, not Yiddish—though they undoubtedly spoke Yiddish as well as Russian and Ukrainian, and probably also Polish.  My dad learned German as a child because, his father being a pharmacist who was at work when school let out, Dad spent his afternoons with his grandmother—who never learned English.

[The blessing of which Nimoy spoke above is called the Birkat Kohanim (“priestly blessing”) or Nesiat Kapayim (“lifting of the hands”).  The text, from Numbers 6:23-7, is: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee; / The Lord make His face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee; / The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”  (English versions of the blessing differ depending on the translation used.  Particularly in Reform or Liberal synagogues, most prayers are spoken today in English or other modern tongue.

[The blessing is traditionally chanted by the kohanim, the priests of ancient Judaism who are members of the tribe of Kohan (or Cohan), the descendants of Aaron, the bother of Moses.  In modern Judaism, especially among Reform or Liberal Jews, the concept of priesthood has been abandoned and the blessing is spoken by the cantor or rabbi (who isn’t traditionally a priest but a teacher).

[The Birkat Kohanim is meant to bless the congregation in the name of God and keep them safe from evil.  Today it’s usually given as a benediction at the end of the worship service before the congregants leave the sanctuary.

[The hand sign accompanying the blessing, which evolved into the Vulcan greeting, is formed with both hands, the two thumbs touching each other to form the symbolic representation of the letter shin (ש).  Nimoy adjusted the gesture for Star Trek to make it a one-hand sign.]