Leonard Nimoy Dies, Vulcan Salute Lives On: Spock Used Salute As Symbol Of Jewish Faith, Blessing [Video]


The Vulcan Salute is an iconic image designed to remind Star Trek fans around the globe to “live long and prosper.” However, many fans are unaware that the Vulcan Salute actually had deep meaning to the actor who played Spock, Leonard Nimoy, in regards to his Jewish faith.

Leonard Nimoy died last Friday, and since his death, fans have been showing support by spreading images of the Vulcan Salute across the vast expanse of social media. In fact, even an astronaut on the International Space Station showed his love for Nimoy by giving the iconic salute from space.

With the salute making its way around the web, it is a perfect time to look at the origin of the iconic Star Trek image. Just last year, Nimoy was speaking with the Yiddish Book Center Oral History Project, where he explained that the Vulcan Salute goes much deeper than Star Trek. In fact, the salute was not only an image of prosperity in the fictional world of Star Trek, but also symbolic in Nimoy’s real life. The hand gesture was one that Nimoy remembers from his childhood in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Boston. Nimoy says that the symbol is representative of the Hebrew letter “shin.”

“‘This is the shape of the letter shin,’ 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.'”

Nimoy says that the gesture was used during the service as a symbol of “blessing” and it really stuck with him. Nimoy would practice making the shin symbol with his hands as a child and recalled the moment he first saw it performed as “magical.”

“They get their tallits over their heads, and they start this chanting. And my father said to me, ‘don’t look’.” 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 puts his hands in the iconic V shape) I had no idea what was going on, but the sound of it and the look of it was magical.”

Therefore, when the opportunity presented itself in Star Trek to create a special Vulcan greeting, the Jewish blessing shin symbol immediately came to mind. The symbol would become somewhat of a legend in the science fiction realm and Nimoy couldn’t be happier about it.

“People don’t realize they’re blessing each other with this!”

Did you know that Leonard Nimoy’s famous Vulcan Salute was actually a Jewish blessing?

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