Rabbi Asks: How Is This Flight Different from All Other Flights?

Like many rabbis, Yonassan Gershom (left) has an idea for a book to explain Judaism to pop audiences, and he’s lucky enough to get an interview with The Forward to talk about it, even though he doesn’t have a publisher yet. What he does have, though, is a gimmick: Star Trek as a driving engine for Jewish themes.

Now, just about every Trekkie on the planet knows from reading I Am Not Spock that Leonard Nimoy based the Vulcan salute on a gesture of blessing performed by kohanim during the morning amidah. Gershom tells that story, but he’s also got some deeper stuff in mind, like using the episode where a transporter malfunction splits Kirk into two different personalities to explain yetzer ha’rah and yetzer ha’tov (which for the benefit of goyim were previously most simply described as the angel and the devil that pop up over a cartoon character’s shoulders whenever he or she is trying to decide whether to commit a sinful act).

Gershom attributes his inability to find a publisher* to the seemingly waning popularity of Star Trek, but I suspect his real problem is calling the project Jewish Themes in Star Trek: Where No Rabbi Has Gone Before!. He’s got the title and subtitle reversed, for one thing, and that title… oy. Live Long and Prosper, maybe?

*For this book, you understand; he’s published three mystically-inflected books on Judaism with small presses in the past 15 years.

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