Oh, I’m sorry, I guess I must’ve hallucinated the part where he was LITERALLY RESURRECTED FROM THE DEAD.
Okay I finally have energy/enough sleep to respond to this.
Has no one on this website heard of the concept of coding??? Or more basically the fact that people in a religious group are not homogeneous and can have varying levels of practice??? No one is saying Spock is getting up here putting a kippah on and reading from a Torah but I swear people have to be willfully ignorant to ignore the parallels that SO MANY JEWS have pointed out between Vulcans’ HIGHLY MYSTICAL culture and Jewish mysticism. These parallels are indicative of Jew coding, where the writer(s) don’t literally say “hey this character is Jewish” but they do about every other reference in the book besides explicitly saying it. Vulcan Jewishness can’t even be classified as subtle but I swear unless Spock wore a T-shirt saying “I’m Jewish” people would be in (probably bluespock’s) inbox talking about how there’s not enough proof, as if everyone’s forgotten how to infer. Did everyone need Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy to pull a Charles Dickens and refer to his only Jewish character as “the Jew” like a True Antisemite™ for this to sound believable?
Like Jew coding is a thing it’s a very real culture phenomenon, and it’s usually used negatively (just like queer coding) to give obviously evil/greedy/selfish characters Jewish characteristics. Just like queer coded villains typically break gender/sexual binaries and hierarchies as part of their coding, Jew coded villains are money grubbing, large nosed, empathy-lacking outsiders who probably make children uncomfortable for good measure (because we can’t have the Jews corrupting our Good Christian Youth™). And even if people don’t pick up on this explicitly they still start to subconsciously associate these characteristics, these JEWISH characteristics, with evil and sin. Which is why it’s so important to have explicitly Jewish and Jew-coded HEROES in media, to combat this. I honestly do not understand why people are so hell bent on taking that away.
Also if I hear one more person make the trite, tired argument that science and religion cannot coexist I’m going to hurl several history books at this website. That is a fabrication made up in the last century that has never before been the case and is still barely true. Most scientists before 1850 were devout Christians (start with Issac Newton and just keep looking up his contemporaries and the scientists of the next half century; there are so many examples), and that’s not even getting into the amazing Muslim mathematicians that have existed over the past several centuries. Albert Einstein was literally Jewish. Like, literally left Nazi Germany for fear of being killed Jewish. Like, people didn’t want to give his theories the time of day for YEARS because of antisemitism Jewish.
You can be spiritual/religious and still believe in science. You can be a SCIENTIST and still be spiritual/religious. Ironically, Vulcans are such a good example of that. Their spirituality and their logic are present in different parts of their lives. Their spirituality serves one purpose and their logic serves another. Shockingly, people can have different approaches to different concepts and problems. Yet, people will continue to perpetuate the idea that science and religion are black and white opposites even though there’s barely a basis for it.
According to the novels, Spocks mother had Jewish family so if you count them as canon it’s literally canon that Spock is Jewish
has no one ever seen the Original Series episode “Patterns of Force”?
the episode where Kirk and Spock (played by the very Jewish William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) beam down to an alien planet, Ekos, that has (because reasons) instituted a Nazi regime?
the episode where the Zeons (the aliens being persecuted by the Ekosians) are named things like Isak and Abrom?
the one where Kirk and Spock are arrested for being suspected Zeons? and then Spock, being “examined” by the Nazi scientists, is declared an obviously inferior and unintelligent subspecies because of the shape of his facial features, while we, the audience, know that he’s the goddamn science officer? THAT EPISODE?
like holy hot damn, they just about stopped short of having him read from the Torah. there’s coding and then there’s A TOTAL LACK OF SUBTLETY.
Has no one ever read Nemoy’s very own explanation that he devised the Vulcan salute from the Priestly Blessing position, representing the Hebrew letter Shin (ש)? Guess what? Jewish!
If you don’t want to read Leonard Nimoy’s biography, this part is on Wikipedia, for cripe’s sake!
I made a post about all of this awhile back, and despite its generally very positive reception, I’ve been receiving pitifully uneducated “SPOCK CAN’T BE JEWISH!!1!!!!” messages about it ever since. I’m so damn tired.
At this point, I don’t even care if Spock is explicitly religious or not (despite the SIGNIFICANT evidence to display that he and most other Vulcans are at the very least spiritual)—the point is, the goyim who send these messages are displaying and exercising uninformed rhetoric rooted in a FUNDAMENTAL misunderstanding of how ethnoreligions work.
You can blindly and unenlightenedly dismiss these fictional interpretations and analyses all you want, but at the end of the day, you still haven’t learned a damn thing about Judaism and Jewish identity.
jews have been involved with science fiction since the start. you would not have science fiction as it is today without jews: not just people who were born to jewish parents but actual practicing jews sharing their values and practices and philosophies. they’re not guests in this house. they built it with you.
to feel the moment shifting and to understand where I just was and where I am going to be now. but this big ship is distraction of people who want to share feelings with each other
to experience love, to understand that heartache is not only a feeling, but a person and a place and to realize that the connection you feel between yourself and another person is why you are alive.
each day spent aboard the big ship strengthens the argument for the soul, for past lives, for future lives, for generosity, for kindness.
change will lead the blind and enlighten the lost and sometimes it will hit you hard. You either embrace the change or you fight it but as much as you try you will never beat change.
you’re supposed to fall in, the fall is that feeling you can’t describe. sort of like a hundred sunsets hitting you all at once. the big ship’s movement is subtle but it is there, it’s the ambassador of change. and sometimes the change is all you can hope for
Change is just the act of becoming something else, and it already started happening long before you were ready. Throughout time change is the only thing that we have been able to rely on. So if it is going to be there anyways, you might as try to understand why it is happening and realize that change might just be on your side.
If you find yourself boarding a big ship full of strange and unfamiliar faces, remember that change is going to happen and some of those faces may soon become friends and those friends will change and you will grow closer and you will fall apart and you will replace these friends with new friends and you may even fall in love with some of them.
Then you will look back and believe everything seems like it just was meant to be this way and you will wonder how you could have ever hoped it would be another way and you will hope it will stay this way forever and then you will realize change is about to happen again and the big ship will board and you will be met with a thousand unfamiliar faces but you will know what to do
you will look back, and you will change.
I look out the window at sunset because that is when I can see change happening in front of me and I can remind myself that each day spent aboard the big ship is another day that I have changed into something different and I think that’s a pretty remarkable thing in itself.
“Each Day Spent”, words and image by James R. Eads inspired by Brian Eno’s song “The Big Ship”. Motion by the Glitch
actually to be honest i bet jim decides early on that a fistbump is the perfect solution to not being able to high-five spock because it requires no finger-to-finger contact–the realization just comes to him, a moment of inspired clarity and genius–and that’s how he pitches it to spock, as a way of engaging in a fundamentally human social practice modified to take vulcan sensibilities into consideration
so after that, after successful away missions or diplomatic meetings, when spock’s theories are correct or jim pulls something crazy off, jim holds out a fist and spock bumps it with his own, and it’s one of those little ways in which jim is constantly adapting in order to show spock there is a place for the in-betweeners
the first time bones sees it happen, though, he almost chokes on his tongue
No but, ok, watch it unironically take off among Vulcans and their close human and other hand-touching species because it really is a good middle ground?