A Star Trek Chanukah
So my first experience with Star Trek was not actually watching Star Trek.
It was not even playing Star Trek on the elementary school playground with my friends who were really into Star Trek TNG (I hadn’t seen it at the time, but everyone always wanted me to play Beverly Crusher.)
It was in kindergarten, in a Chanukah play.
I went to an extracurricular Hebrew school program to learn about my heritage, up until high school (I’m not sure exactly how much learning went on in general, but I was diligent about doing the lessons and filling out the workbooks while most of the kids misbehaved.) Kindergarten was my first year of this extra school.
One of the few holidays in the calendar that gets kids at all excited is Chanukah. It’s not really a major holiday like Christmas, but its importance has been inflated due to how prevalent Christmas coverage is in North America. Thus, the Powers That Be decided the children were going to put on a Chanukah play.
Not just any Chanukah play.
A Star Trek Chanukah play.
Bear in mind this was 1988 or 1989, and TNG was in full swing by then.
I don’t know if one of the teachers wrote it, or where it came from, but here it was: a play where the TNG characters were on trial for violating the Prime Directive in saving Chanukah.
That’s right: the reason why the oil, only enough for a day, burned for eight?
It was the Enterprise. We had saved the Jews.
And I was Dr. Beverly Crusher.
A four or five-year-old Beverly Crusher, who was arguing for the importance of preserving humanity.
In any case, I can’t remember most of the show, which is a real pity. All I remember is the entire cast, yelling in chorus, “NOT THE PRIME DIRECTIVE!” when we were told it had been violated. (A little like how I envision most meetings between Enterprise captains and the admiralty to go.)
I still am not quite sure if the whole experience was real, or if it was some sort of long-ago fever dream. One of my fondest wishes is to one day find a copy of the script. I keep thinking about the teacher who chose to do it, who I probably thought was ancient but was likely about my age now.
That’s how I started with Star Trek, even though there was something of a hiatus between elementary school and graduate school. I can still draw a pretty clean line between tiny me bellowing “NOT THE PRIME DIRECTIVE!” and me rapping as MC Crusher, The Bae From Sickbay, at a comedy show in the past year.
It reminds me of how many groups of people have felt a kinship with Star Trek, because of its message of hope, optimism and humanity first, and as ridiculous as it seems, it’s not the strangest thing for me to believe that the Enterprise saved Chanukah.
Not the Prime Directive, indeed.
