Boston and the origin of the "live long and prosper" gesture

I got back from Boston on Wednesday night. As Boston is a great city to walk in, I just assumed that it would be a great place to bike in. I was going to rent a bike and explore, but their traffic signals are crazy. Everyone jaywalks because all of the signals are red for about half a minute.

I did the Freedom Trail on Monday until the U.S.S. Constitution when I decided to jump on the ferry back to downtown. I splurged for the guided tour. It was led by a passionate pie lady with a rolling pin that she would use to punctuate her emphatic gestures. The Freedom Trail took me past the Italy-Ghana game at a little Italian cafe in the North End so I stopped. I stood, watching the last 30 minutes of the game and experienced an Italian goal. Sitting in front of me was an American soccer hooligan. He was chiseled and shaven with a shiner and a broken nose. I was slightly horrified because I didn't know that those things happened in America.

Tuesday I lounged around Harvard Square. I bought two soccer books. During the hottest part of the day I went to see "An Inconvenient Truth", that documentary with Al Gore. I'm glad that he has decided to be his dry-humored relaxed self. For supper I went to Charlie's Kitchen which turned out to be my cousin's favorite. It was down-home with a bar for random singletons like me. I struck up a conversation with an amazing woman named Karla. She was in town (by that I mean Cambridge) to lead a seminar on social justice. She was still planning her activity. She wanted to give her students (the cream of the crop from all the Ivy League schools) a list of conversation topics that they will have to go out to Harvard Square and engage specific schicks of society in. She also comes to the Twin Cities fairly often so I promised to take her to Al's Breakfast. I saw the "Dewey, Chattham, and Howe" office window. My boyfriend and I thought that it was fictious until now. I didn't see Car Talk Plaza though.

On Wednesday I raced to make it to the free Black Heritage guided tour through Beacon Hill. It was outstanding and I recommend it to anyone. We stopped at the Vilna Shul, a turn-of-the-20th-century synagogue that is under renovation and our tour guide and the rabbi gossiped about the fate of the Coburn House that should be on the walking tour, but was being torn down because it wasn't on the historic registry because it was in the interior of the block. Doh! Our tour guide recommended coming back to the Shul because they had a great exhibit on Eastern European synagogues that were destroyed during the world wars.

So I did come back afterward and found the rabbi training in his new docent-intern, a freshly bar-mitzahed (a word that they used, didn't know that it could be a verb) young man named Daniel. The rabbi showed me around the Eastern European synagogue exhibit and then on the second floor, it was the interns turn. We were standing in front of the ark and he let me examine it quietly for a few moments. Then he said,"First let me tell you about the Star Trek symbol" My eyes darted around the ark, searching for a communicator badge carved into the wood. They rested on a carving of 2 hands making the Vulcan farewell gesture with the index fingers and thumbs touching.

They explained that there are different levels of rabbis. The urban communities were able to attract the rabbis that were able to make this hand gesture themselves. The rural shtedel (sp.) attacted run-of-the-mill rabbis so they added this carving to their arks. The gesture is used to channel God to the people. The fingers are separated so that more of God will come through, not just the triangle, but also through the fingers.

Leonard Nimoy grew up in the West End of Boston in a synagogue established by a community from the rural part of Eastern Europe. So when they asked him to come up with a Vulcan hand gesture, he used this. The orthodox urban Jewish community was alarmed because they were never supposed to see this symbol, as they heads are always bowed when it is made by their rabbi.