A most Jewish moment in the Original Star Trek series, this confrontation between Spock and McCoy took my breath away. Spock’s soliloquy (truly speaking his mind outloud) comes as if out of nowhere n the mirror of post-Holocaust Jewish collective consciousness, Jewish-Christian friction and racial difference. It appeared on “The Immunity Syndrome” S2 E18, Star Trek (Remastered) (1968). In the episode, as per Wikipedia, the encounter with an “energy-draining, space-dwelling organism” begins when the USS Enterprise receives “a garbled message from Starfleet mentioning the USS Intrepid, a Federation starship crewed entirely by Vulcans.” Something terrible has happened. In a spasm of pain, Spock felt or sensed something horrible.

[Sickbay]

(Spock is on a biobed, being scanned.)

SPOCK: I assure you, Doctor, I am quite all right. The pain was momentary. It passed quickly.

McCOY: All of my instruments seem to agree with you if I can trust these crazy Vulcan readings. Spock, how can you be so sure the lntrepid was destroyed?

(Spock gets off the bed)

SPOCK: I sensed it die.

McCOY: But I thought you had to be in physical contact with a subject before

SPOCK: Doctor, even I, a half-Vulcan, could hear the death scream of four hundred Vulcan minds crying out over the distance between us.

McCOY: Not even a Vulcan could feel a starship die.

SPOCK: Call it a deep understanding of the way things happen to Vulcans, but I know not a person, not even the computers on board the Intrepid, knew what was killing them or would have understood it had they known.

McCOY: But four hundred Vulcans?

SPOCK: I’ve noticed that about your people, Doctor. You find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million. You speak about the objective hardness of the Vulcan heart, yet how little room there seems to be in yours.

McCOY: Suffer the death of thy neighbour, eh, Spock? You wouldn’t wish that on us, would you?

SPOCK: It might have rendered your history a bit less bloody.