This is a (probably) one-time digression from the usual range of topics on this blog. Because of my new, eternal interests, I largely gave up television, including Star Trek reruns, about forty years ago. But learning today of the passing of Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on Star Trek, reminded me of his influence on me years ago—and a comment I made about this just two nights ago.

Nimoy himself introduced the divided fingers for the Vulcan salute, “Live long and prosper,” based on his own Jewish background: in Jewish tradition, priests held their hands that way when they offered the priestly benediction, filtering the Shekinah. Nimoy also later played the prophet Samuel in a movie about King David. But at the time I watched Star Trek, I didn’t have any religious interests.

Two night ago, I was telling a friend how, when I was nine, I didn’t believe in God, in life after death, or meaning in life. I didn’t see a reason to live. But then I thought of Mr. Spock: rational and logical, yet he didn’t decide to end his life. Perhaps I didn’t know a reason to live, I reasoned, but I also didn’t have a reason to die right away, either. Perhaps there was a reason, and I would find it later. By age thirteen, I was exploring Plato on the soul’s immortality; by this age, I could find faults in his logic, but Plato’s quest for meaning and hope influenced me. Eventually I did discover meaning in life in God. But for a nine-year-old, the image of a rational Mr. Spock served a somewhat irrational yet helpful purpose in my life. My friend said, “God works in strange ways.”

Indeed, and with the passing of Mr. Spock, I am reminded again how in a very strange way that fictitious character played by Leonard Nimoy helped encourage me to live.