TouchéGet the appSpock's salute began as a blessing Nimoy wasn't meant to see
In a 1967 episode of Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy gave Mr. Spock a greeting: one raised hand, the fingers split between the middle and ring fingers.
Star Trek opened its second season on September 15, 1967, with "Amok Time," the only episode of the original series with scenes on Spock's home planet, Vulcan. In it Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, raised one hand with the palm forward, the thumb out and the fingers parted between the middle and ring fingers. The words that went with it, "Live long and prosper," came from the episode's writer, the science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon.
The hand was Nimoy's idea. He and the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry, thought the spoken greeting should come with something physical. Nimoy had grown up in Boston, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, and as a boy he sang in his synagogue's choir.
In the Priestly Blessing, the kohanim, descendants of the ancient Hebrew priests, raise both hands over the congregation. Their thumbs touch, and the four fingers of each hand are usually split into two pairs. The shape forms the Hebrew letter shin, an emblem for Shaddai, "Almighty." Jewish tradition holds that the Divine Presence shines through the priests' fingers, and no one is supposed to look. The priests' prayer shawls are draped over their heads and hands.
At an Orthodox service when he was a child, Nimoy peeked. Years later he made the same shape with one hand. It looked alien and mysterious enough for a Vulcan.
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In a 1968 interview, The New York Times described the gesture as a "double-fingered version of Churchill's victory sign," and Nimoy said he had decided the Vulcans were a "hand-oriented" people. In his 1975 autobiography, I Am Not Spock, he wrote that he had based it on the Priestly Blessing.
The shape is hard for some people to make without practice. The 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact turned that into a joke. When Zefram Cochrane meets a Vulcan for the first time in human history, he cannot return the salute, so he shakes the Vulcan's hand.
In 2014 the salute became an emoji. Nimoy died in February 2015, and President Barack Obama's statement called it "the universal sign for 'Live long and prosper.'" The next day the astronaut Terry Virts posted a photo from the International Space Station of his own hand making the salute, with the Earth behind it. The station was passing over Boston.