Leonard Nimoy discussing the Vulcan Salute 1968

Description

Leonard Nimoy did not create the Vulcan salute that means “Live Long and Prosper” out of thin air for the season two opener “Amok Time,” which was the first time we got to see Spock among his people on Vulcan. It was actually borrowed from something he had witnessed as a child when he was attending a service at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue with his family.

“Five or six guys get up on the bimah, the stage, facing the congregation,” Nimoy told the Yiddish Book Center in 2014. “They get their tallits over their heads, and they start this chanting—I think it’s called Duchenne—and my father said to me, ‘Don’t look.’ So everyone’s got their eyes covered with their hands or they’ve got their tallit down over their faces … And I hear this strange sound coming from them. They’re not singers, they were shouters. And dissonant. It was all discordant … it was chilling. I thought, ‘Whoa, something major is happening here.’ So I peeked. And I saw them with their hands stuck out from beneath the tallit like this [does salute with both hands] towards the congregation. Wow. Something really got hold of me. I had no idea what was going on, but the sound of it and the look of it was magical.”

The hand gesture represents the Hebrew letter Shin, which represents the word Shaddai, a name for God. It looks like a lot of people have been blessing each other without knowing it.

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