Newsmaker Of The Week

Producer: Leon Warden
Director: Susan Shapiro
Audio: Kyle J. Maki
Camera: Kyle J. Maki, Susan Shapiro

Host: You have a new book: Shekhina
LN: The book has been out for a while, its a photographic study of the subject of the feminine aspect of God. Several years ago a rabbi educated me to the idea that Jewish mythology tells us that God created a feminine aspect of himself. Split off a feminine aspect of himself to live amongst humans. And the idea intrigued me. I've been involved with photography for many, many years, ever since I was a teenager. And I have been working on the images of the female figure. I became intrigued with the idea of exploring the idea of the possibility of finding these ways of expressing this in photographic imagery - the idea of this feminine deity that supposedly exhibits a lot of light, compassion, sensitivity, intercedes between humans and God - that's essentially what motivated the book.

Host: Now, the Lady in front of the book and in some of the pictures is wearing nothing more than some vestments, typically worn by men.
LN: Right...

Host: How did you come to express the idea and the idea of her wearing that it that way?

LN: You know, it may be surprising to somebody, but not necessarily everybody that the religion and the literature of religion carries an awful lot of sensuality in it. There are numerous stories that have to do with the sexuality or sensuality of the historical figures. I decided to try away of portraying some misty cloud. I decided to make her a flesh and blood being

who could appear or disappear if she chose to. If she appeared, it would be physical. It would be an actual physical feminine figure. And it has created some degree of intense conversation in some community in some quarters. But by at large the reception had been very positive, a lot of people have been intrigued, want to know what this is all about. Maybe they have some Jewish background or have some sense of the history, the idea, but have never been confronted with this physical reality that I have given in her.

And you are right. The talith, the prayer shawl she wears, and the black phylacteries she wears around her arm are typically worn by Jewish males. So here is a certain kind of transgression going on. I figure if this is a deity, this is a holy power figure, and I think she is, she can wear whatever she wants. Who am I to say: "You can't wear that?" you know?

Host: In your mind is she what the allegorical figure looks like?

LN: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
I was showing this work some time ago at an artist retreat. A number of artists working in Jewish territories creating... Jewish art and so forth

and someone said: "Your Shekhina doesn't look anything like my Shekhina." And I said: "What does your Shekhina look like?" And he said: "Mine looks more like my bubbe, my grandmother." I said: "Well, everybody's entitled to their own Shekhina. You have yours and I have mine." He says, "You're a very lucky guy."

Host: Where do you get the book?

LN: Probably in some bookstores, but it is available on Amazon dot com.

Host: You said there is some, I don't know, interesting reaction to it. And you've come out here to congregation Beth Shalom which is a conservative congregation. I guess we'll find out when you make your presentation in a few moments, but how is it received? How do you think the congregation will receive it?

LN: I am curious. I don't know the answer to that question. We will see in a couple of hours. I have had a very wide range of response. There is everything from welcoming and accepting response in a positive kind of way to a total censorship rejection.

In a couple of congregations where I was initially invited to speak, when they saw the book, they saw the images, they said: "No, don't come. Don't bring those pictures here." So, I wouldn't be surprised by whatever the reception is. Most important is that the ideas that this book engenders, the conversations it agendas, is exciting, interesting and stimulating. And I think this is for a lot of people as well.

Host: That's what I was going to ask you. What kind of emotion or reaction do you want the people to come away with when they look at the photograph?

LN: I want the people to be enlightened in some way that they learn something that perhaps they haven't known before. I want them to be moved in some way, perhaps it might surprise them. The subject matter moved me when I began to explore it. I said in the book that making these images were a very spiritual experience, interesting for me. That it brought me closer to spirituality. That it surprised me.

I like people to think its a worthwhile piece of work. It is also by the way, it is a work of art and therefore should be stimulating in some way. If it is not stimulating it is simply decorative... These images, some people think they are pretty, I probably agree with most of that, but they are not simply decoration.

Host: How long have you been in this spirituality?

LN: Well... the origins of this idea for the book came to me about 8 or 9 years ago, in a conversation with our family rabbi in Los Angeles. He was the first one who introduced me to the idea of Shekhina, the feminine aspect of God. And that there is a point through the service where the mythology tell us that the Shekhina comes into the sanctuary to bless the congregation...

... and I remember as a kid, maybe 8 or 9 years old in an orthodox service, at a certain point at the service my father said to me: "Don't look." and everybody got their eyes covered and their prayer shawls over their heads. And I never understood why, and this rabbi explained that the mythology tells us that that's the moment when the Shekhina comes into the sanctuary...

... and the congregation protects itself from the awesome light that might hurt you, hurting your eyes. That's why you don't look. So, when I heard that, when he told me that, I began to wonder: What might it be like to try to visualize this? To try to capture it with the camera.

Host: Where were you 8 or 9 years old?
LN: Boston

Host: And were your parents religious people?
LN: They were observant. We lived three generations in an apartment with my parents, my grandparents and my brother and I. And I would say the observant people were my grandparents. We lived in a kosher environment and my parents took separate dishes for the meats and so forth...

Host: How does an 8 or 9 year old Jewish kid come into Hollywood?

LN: (laughing) Well... at the same time I became interested in photography, I also was very lucky. I lived in a neighborhood that was very cultural. Boston was and still is a very kind of thriving city... a lot of theatre, a lot of dance, a lot of music. And the neighborhood I lived in had a wonderful little theatre that was known as a settlement house. The first place where kids would go after school. You could get involved with a science program or athletics program and there was a theatre program. One day somebody said to me: "Come and see those people in that room down there." I was eight years old and I walked in and they said: "Sing us 'God bless America' " or something.

I did and the next thing I know I was Hansel in a production of Hansel and Gretel. That's how the whole thing started. I continued acting there until I was in my late teens and I decided that's what I wanted to do with my life.

Host: And then you decided to go to Hollywood... at some time you were under contract with Republic?

LN: Now, not exactly. I was a free-lancer. I worked with Republic... I worked with Universal, I worked with all the studios. I did some work with Republic, I did Westerns. Science Fiction, shows for the early 1950s. How did you know that?

Host: I watched, I did some reading about your background. I was watching the Westerns channel the other night. I saw you in a cowboy-hat.

LN: They also took me as an Indian. I played Indian in the Republic movies. There was a series of films with an actor named Rex Allan and his buddy was an actor named Slim Pickers.

And they needed somebody like me to play the bad guy, that was me. I rode horses and wore a wig, that's what I remember.

Host: What's your earliest memory about the... area as we call it?
LN: I remember working in Vasquez Rocks a number of times... The last time I was working in Vasquez Rocks was when I was working on Star trek IV, a movie I directed. And maybe some other projects I do not recall at the moment. But Vasquez Rocks was very useful, that desolate kind of uncivilized rocks...
Westerns...
LN: I did all the TV shows, I was in Wagon Train, Rawhide, you name it, I was there. I cannot remember all the names, but I must have appeared in 15 or 20 different Westerns... In Westerns I played the bad guys and sometimes the other characters. Often people who were in trouble of some kind.

Host: Obviously you went in the science fiction direction to a great extent and kind of left the Westerns behind.

LN: The Westerns... in Star Trek instead of the Indians, it became the Klingons.

LN: I mean that's a fact: Westerns kind of disappeared when Science Fiction became the frontier as opposed to the Westerns. The Westerns kind of gradually faded away...

Host: Throughout those early years did religion, did spirituality have any impact on you?

LN: No. No, not that I recall. Much, much later, maybe 20 years ago I produced and acted in a television movie called "Never Forget". Based on a true story, based on a man who lived in Southern California who had been taken into Auschwitz with is family during second World War and lost his parents and siblings, came out alone, 17 or 18 when he came out, alive, and he eventually got into battle with an organization who are Holocaust deniers, people which are distributing literature saying the Holocaust was a hoax. He got into legal battle with them and he finally won a case against them in Los Angeles in 1979. So, about 20 years ago I think that's the closest I come to dealing with... Jewish issues.

Host: Since we are here and since we are on the subject of religion, tell me about the hand gesture Spock came out with. Well, you came out with...

LN (laughing): We are sort dancing around this issue in this conversation. I want to get to it on the nail, really. (laughing)

During the service that I mentioned earlier when supposedly the Shekhina comes in into the sanctuary to bless the congregation, the priestly tribe bless the congregation with a prayer that we know in the English and in the Hebrew testament, thus "May the Lord bless you and may the Lord keep you..." In the service that my family attended when I was a kid, these gentlemen, who did that prayer, who'd bless the congregation with that prayer, and I had no idea what it was, but it intrigued me and it was in that moment that my dad said: "Don't look." And everybody has got their eyes covered and I peeked. I as an 8 year old kid that was curious and I peeked. And I started working on it, I wanted to master that, to be able to do that. I just put it away in my head some place.

I didn't know why they were doing that, but I learned later that this is the shape of a Hebrew letter, a letter in the Hebrew alphabet called "shin". And the shin is the first letter in the word shaddai which is the name of the Almighty and it is also the first letter in shekhina which is the name of the feminine aspect of the Almighty. So, the idea is that they are using a symbol of God's name when they bless the congregation with that.

And we were doing an episode of Star Trek where my character Spock had to go back to his home planet of Vulcan, it was the first time we were going to Vulcan in this series, we've never seen Vulcan before, we've never seen any other Vulcan before, Spock was the only Vulcan we knew. And in the scene... there had to be some kind of a greeting, so I suggested that. I introduced it into Star Trek.

Host: You know I noticed that you had done some photography of hands, does the hand have some particular importance?
LN: I guess. I guess so.
Host: I mean spiritually.
LN: I don't think so. I was intrigued with the idea. It was useful as a form of greeting. Hands can be terribly expressive. I have done some photography around the issue of the hands, but it is not a major threat of my work, I have done a little bit along on that line. Some of it is on my website. In that particular case I was just intrigued with that...

Host: Frankly that wasn't where I was going. What I was going to is whether spirituality had an impact on you in your film. If you look at Star Trek II and IV, particularly III you directed, there is very much a spirituality to the character with me. We are trying to get a picture of the whole Leonard Nimoy here.

LN: Ja, ... ja. Not necessarily religious but spiritual yes. You know that spirituality is a word we hear a lot. And I use it freely and maybe too freely. What does it really mean? To me it means morality, it means ethics, living ethically, living a decent life, treating people decently, caring about what happens to somebody beside yourself, being aware that you are not alone on this planet and not everything is about you, that there are reasons to take other people into consideration and other things, other issues to take into consideration beside your own daily responsibility, beside your own career and your own needs and desires. It just means living a full life as a considerate human being. That's what I consider being a spiritual person. It doesn't necessarily mean.. I know people who don't believe in God but I consider them spiritual people. So I think that spirituality is something which not necessarily religious. It can be of course, but not necessarily religious.

Host: Do you go to the synagogue regularly?
LN: Not regularly, we go on my high holidays, my rabbi happens to be my wife's cousin. We think a lot of him. He runs a very good congregation. One of the reasons we think a lot of him, we think highly of him, because his bent, his orientation is for the community. It's not about are you a good Jew or are you a bad person, or are you evil or are you sinning or that kind of thing, it is about being a useful part of the community. It is about helping, it is about making a puzzle-impact, we believe in that.

Host: One last question has particularly to do with our valley. I understand that in an episode of the original "Star Trek" called "The Arena", where Captain Kirk is at Vasquez Rocks battling this green lizard called the Gorn - which was played by Bobby Clark, who lives here in the Santa Clarita Valley - I understand you got too close to an explosion that went off.
LN: Bill and I... it was not an exterior place, we were on the sound stage. It was an explosion that went off on camera... it was a planned explosion. When an explosion goes off in the scene, in a movie, they will open the sound stage doors so that the concussion has some place to go. It can go up, outside the doors. Well, they had failed to open the doors. There was a big concussion within the building. And we were close to it, and since then Bill and I, both have a ringing in our ears which is called tinnitus. And we believe it was caused by that particular experience. It might have been on that particular episode...

Host: What's your connection to the congregation Beth Shalom? Why are you here?
LN: Adam N. who is a member of this congregation, is a good friend of mine, we have been working together for maybe 30 years, he is a convention producer, and he has produced a number of very successful Star Trek conventions; I've been there with Bill Shatner or some of the other Star Trek people. So he asked me whether I would come out and do this. So, this is the reason why I'm here.

Host: I guess we'll find out what the reception is.
LN: O.k., if I get into trouble, help me out, will you?
Host: All right, you got it. Thank you very much, Leonard.
LN: Thank you.