Because 2016 continues in some ways to be a dumpster fire of a year, yesterday we lost singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.

Famously, Cohen wrote constantly about Jewish themes in his work, from “Who By Fire” inspired by Unetaneh Tokef, and “Hallelujah” containing Biblical imagery pertaining to King David (such naches from the most over-covered song of all time).

Cohen, who was 82, had been speaking frankly lately about his own mortality, and he left us with a life and career fully culminated. In his final album, You Want it Darker, he even quotes the Kaddish. But this isn’t the first time we’ve heard traditional prayer from Cohen.

Cohen’s final performance in Israel was in 2009, a concert in Ramat Gan. Proceeds went to bereaved families on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and as the concert closed, Cohen addressed them, offering them comfort, and then a prayer.

The last name was no coincidence, of course, Cohen himself was a Kohen, and he stretched his hands out towards the audience in the traditional gesture and made the priestly blessing. It translates as:

The Lord bless you and protect you. The Lord deal kindly and graciously with you. The Lord bestow His favor upon you and grant you peace.

Like a benevolent folk rock zeyde, Cohen leaves us at a tough time for many of us, but with a reservoir of comfort that we really need. We have his astounding career and body of work, and you can receive your blessing of peace from him below:

Image by Takahiro Kyono via Flickr.

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It’s no secret that Star Trek’s ‘Vulcan Salute’ comes from the Jewish priestly blessing performed in synagogue on certain holidays (or, if you’re in Israel, every day). Leonard Nimoy (AKA Spock) introduced the greeting to the show himself based on what he’d seen in shul as a small child, and wrote about it in his 1975 autobiography I Am Not Spock.

But here’s something new! The National Yiddish Book Center’s oral history project recently released an extended interview with Nimoy, in which he memorably mimics the duchening and describes seeing the hand gesture for the first time:

“So I’m with my father, my grandfather, and my brother, sitting in the bench seats—women were upstairs. Five or six guys get up on the bimah, the stage, facing the congregation. They get their tallits over their heads, and they start this chanting… And my father said to me, ‘don’t look’. So everyone’s got their eyes covered with their hands or their tallit down over their faces… And I hear this strange sound coming from them. They’re not singers, they were shouters. And dissonant… It was all discordant… it was chilling.

I thought, ‘something major is happening here.’ So I peeked. And I saw them with their hands stuck out from beneath the tallit like this… Wow. Something really got hold of me. I had no idea what was going on, but the sound of it and the look of it was magical.”

There’s an equally delightful segment in which he recites the ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ soliloquy from Hamlet in Yiddish, and talks about growing up in a Yiddish-speaking family in Boston’s West End. (Links to the full interview and selected shorts are here.)

Earlier this month, Nimoy announced that he was suffering from chronic lung disease, and turned to Twitter to urge smokers to quit. May he live long and prosper.

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