Steven Gotlib
Mentalism, Theo Annemann wrote in comparison to typical magicians’ tricks, is “a ‘grown up’ phase of magic and mystery… there seems to be a greater element of wonder when the performer can reveal unknown knowledge or something personal about the members of his audience.”[1]
Today, Oz Pearlman is billed as the world’s greatest mentalist. He’s performed on America’s Got Talent, been interviewed by Joe Rogan, featured on 60 Minutes, delivered a TED Talk, and now written a New York Times Bestseller. Pearlman’s distinctive approach, and the controversy which has come with it in the form of multi-hour exposé videos and public debates over his claims of reading body language as opposed to using magic tricks, serves as a fascinating case study on the ethics of deception within both magic and halakhah.[2]
We’ll begin with a detailed overview of what mentalism is and how mentalists typically present themselves to their audiences. Since I am a practicing magician and mentalist on the side as well as being a rabbi, I will be careful not to reveal too many tricks of the trade while still providing a genuine glimpse into our world for “laypeople,” as we refer to those without a background in our craft. From there, we will see how poskim have traditionally handled the performance of magic and what those rulings have to say about the current state of affairs.
A Beginner’s Guide to Mentalism
Like most contemporary mentalists, Oz is clear that what he performs is neither supernatural nor ESP. “I can’t actually read minds,” he writes at the beginning of his book and emphasizes in all of his appearances. “What I can do is read people… and so can you!”[3] He explains further:
Mentalism is magic of the mind. Rather than using fast hands to fool your eyes, I watch the way people move. I listen to the words they choose. I study their patterns and behaviors, often without them realizing I’m doing so. Mentalism is all about psychology, observation, and communication. These small signals tell a much bigger story — and once you know what to look for, you can “read” people almost instantly.[4]
While this all sounds plausible, it’s mostly what magicians refer to as a ‘pseudoexplanation.’ That is, as Dr. Gustav Kuhn explains, “what the magician wants the audience to believe is the true source of the effect” regardless of how it is actually accomplished. For example:
Assume I want to demonstrate that I can read your mind (this is known as mentalism). You pick a random card and look at it, and I then ask you to visualize the card in your mind. After some magical gestures and a very intense stare, I reveal the name of the card you had visualized. The pseudoexplanation here is my ability to read your thoughts via telepathy; the actual method is that the cards are secretly marked, allowing me to identify your card by deciphering the subtle code on its back… Whereas straightforward mind reading was very popular in the past, many magicians today like giving their performance a bit of a psychological twist and so instead claim that they are reading your body language.[5]
In Kuhn’s words, “believing a pseudoexplanation to be real is a way of abolishing the cognitive conflict between belief and experience” and it is the magician’s job “to create a scenario in which you believe that the pseudoexplanation is the only possible cause of the event, even though you’re [hopefully] fully aware that it’s not real.”[6]
Thus, mentalists may more accurately be defined as Drs. Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde do in their book, Sleights of Mind: “magicians who use mathematical probabilities, human nature, sleight of hand, gimmicks, and trust to make it appear that they can read your mind… their illusions are spun from an ability to exploit human gullibility and, as you will see, carry out brilliantly sneaky, under-handed maneuvers.”[7]
Pearlman, of course, is far from the first to claim the use of psychology over psychic phenomena in what he does. The most prominent example in recent history is British “psychological illusionist,” Derren Brown. In the introduction to his book, Tricks of the Mind, Brown presents himself in the following way:
The shows that shove themselves into your living rooms each week, or which trickle down from the ether into your hard-drive during the night, are openly described by none other than me, at the start of what we in the industry call ‘episodes’, as a mixture of ‘magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship’. The routines-stunts-tricks-gags I perform sometimes rely on magical principals, sometimes on psychological ones.[8]
Brown further clarifies that he represents “a craft called ‘mentalism’, which in turn is rooted in magic and conjuring” and admits that his colleagues use their shared techniques in a variety of ways:
[W]hile most magicians are fairly recognizable and conform to a limited set of types, mentalists are fewer and further between and can be radically different. The skills are harder to acquire, and personality is paramount. Many cross what to me is an ethical line and become tarot-readers and ‘psychics’. Some talk to the dead. Some work in churches, both spiritualist and mainstream Christian. Some remain entertainers but routinely claim real psychic ability. Some debunk those that do. Others host seminars of a motivational-weekend-team-buildership variety and sell their abilities as 100 per cent finely tuned psychological skills. The real skills at work may be pure conjuring, or they may rely on knowing how to tell people what they want to hear. They might be harmless, entertaining, useful or inexcusably manipulative. They might be driven by profit, ego, or heartfelt altruism.[9]
Mentalism, thus, presents a far wider range of presentations, and thus potential career paths, than traditional magic. This is, at least in part, because the suspension of belief that is often needed for magic tricks to properly land with an audience need not take place in mentalism demonstrations. In an early interview with magician Jamy Ian Swiss, Brown was quick to acknowledge his own motivations for not marketing himself as a just another magician:
I wanted to come up with a form of magic that was more thought provoking, involving, and a bit more challenging and difficult to dismiss than a lot of magic can be. And this psychological form of magic is what I’ve come up with. But I absolutely tie it back to that. I don’t say that what you see is documentary footage of me using my superior psychological techniques…
Years ago the issue was whether or not you told people it was psychic because people were prepared to believe in psychic ability–and how far down that road do you take them. Now we’re in a situation where we’re into pop psychology, and NLP [Neuro Linguistic Programming], all these huge industries, and people are prepared to believe in that, and maybe in a way that’s the new psychic realm.
Oz Pearlman, on the other hand, seems wont to double-down on his claims of psychological mastery. See, for example, how he describes a near-failure on the Today Show in his book:
On one of my Today show appearances, when we had about forty-five seconds left, on a whim I asked Al Roker to name any celebrity he thought could be elected the next president of the United States. When I gamed out this trick, the Theory of Mind led me to believe he’d choose Taylor Swift. I set up the trick around that specific predicted outcome. Everything I did should have led him to that choice. Unbeknownst to him, I was even wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt under my suit for my big reveal.
Confident in Roker’s answer, I said to him, “Al, who’s running? Shock us.”
With great confidence, Roker replied, “George Clooney,” which was a shock, and he wasn’t who I’d envisioned him picking! He had no idea that, at that moment, my blood pressure was spiking and there was the potential for millions to see me implode on national television.
And yet, in the month that I’d planned for this trick, I knew that him picking Taylor Swift wasn’t a given, although she was the most likely choice. I had visualized this scenario in my mind hundreds of times, figuring out how I could quickly get him to choose the answer I’d anticipated if he didn’t pick it on the first try…
I said to Roker, “Listen, the world is changing. What if it wasn’t a guy who was elected? What if I [sic] was anyone else? Any women?” Instead of thinking that my setup was unsuccessful, Theory of Mind indicated that Al Roker suddenly took pause to worry that he’d inadvertently been sexist to not consider a woman.
Roker screwed up his face for a couple of seconds (that felt like an hour) and thought hard before he said, “Um… Taylor Swift.”[10]
The “Theory of Mind” that Pearlman mentions twice in the anecdote above is what he calls “our ability to attribute mental states to ourselves and others, and to understand that the mental states of others may be different than our own.”[11] It’s a perfectly digestible, if vague, explanation (or maybe pseudoexplanation) of his ability to subtly influence Al Roker to name Taylor Swift instead of George Clooney.
However, without giving too much away, most of the lines that Pearlman says that he told Roker to make the latter feel guilty about being sexist, and get him to think of Taylor Swift instead, do not appear in the video linked above. What he does say to Roker is exactly the type of thing that magicians and mentalists recognize as an attempt to invoke some sort of pre-show work.[12]
This demonstrates a fascinating psychological principle, albeit not the one described by Pearlman. In Kuhn’s words,
Source monitoring errors are extremely common, and magicians frequently use them. For example, when [Spanish magician, Juan] Tamariz summarizes the sequence of events in his card trick, he will purposefully omit certain details (e.g., that he touched the cards) and add further false information (e.g., “You shuffled the cards”). These verbal statements automatically activate mental representations of the events. Later, when you try to work out how the trick was done, you remember something about shuffling the cards, but you might fail to recall the true source of the information. Hence, you falsely believe that you actually carried out the action.[13]
Pearlman’s retelling of his appearance on the Today Show is a masterclass in that phenomenon. When retelling the story with some blink-or-you’ll-miss-them embellishments, it cements the picture in his readers’ minds of the mentalist as a master of psychologically reading and/or manipulating people, rather than a magician performing tricks.
The ease with which people can be misled in this subject is part of why many magicians consider it imperative to disclaim not only supernatural abilities, but psychological ones as well. In his TED Talk, for example, Derren Brown clearly, albeit quickly, described mentalism as “the dubious art of getting inside your head” and emphasized that “I don’t believe for a second that I have any special psychological gifts, let alone any psychic ones.”
What’s the Problem?
The problem with mentalists claiming psychological mastery as the source of their abilities is that the reliability of such methods is questionable at best. Kuhn has noted, for example, that while such techniques are “commonly used in business seminars, there is about as much scientific evidence for the link between eye movements and lying as there is for telepathy.” Within the context of mentalism, then, NLP and body language reading writ large are “merely a pseudoexplanation – impossible yet still believable.”[14]
The importance of disclaiming such abilities is emphasized by Teller, the usually silent half of Penn and Teller:
[W]hen we see a mentalist, we are sometimes left wondering whether we have viewed a show or a science lesson. Many mentalists, doubting their ability to entertain as illusionists, dress their ‘entertainment’ in quasi-scientific robes, suggesting, ‘if you concentrated on developing your natural abilities as I have, you too could do these wonders.’ They hint that their illusions might be real.[15]
As his more outspoken partner, Penn Jillette, puts it:
The rule we try to follow in magic [is] what I refer to as the sawing a person in half rule. When you saw a human being in half on stage, everybody, we can just say, knows you didn’t actually saw a human being into halves. And they leave knowing that they’ve seen a trick. That’s the rule we try to follow with our show, that no one leaves the theater believing something that we ourselves do not think is true on purpose.[16]
Teller’s suggestion has been for mentalists to unambiguously state something like “I am an illusionist, but instead of conjuring with doves and tigers, I do tricks with information.”[17] Only such clear statements can, in his words, “help mentalism find its way out of the shadows of con-artistry and into the glowing area of real art.”[18]
No less an authority in this field than the famous mentalist Banachek, who himself fooled a team of scientists into believing him to be psychic as part of the Project Alpha hoax orchestrated by James Randi[19] and has been billed as the “world’s greatest mind reader” for decades, wrote as follows in advice to those wanting to follow in his footsteps:
one needs to be careful about claiming that all you do is by verbal and non-verbal means. Remember, a lie is a lie. I believe you need to be as honest as you can with your audience so long as you keep the mystery and fascination intact. You must include the word magic or trickery or something of that ilk in your explanation of your powers if using the psychological approach or you are asking for the exposure of your methods.[20]
A Halakhic Perspective
Such disclaimers may not only be ethically required, but halakhically mandated as well. In addition to specific concerns of imitating or otherwise strengthening belief in sorcery, the Sefer HaMitzvot (Negative Mitzvot, 32) and the Sefer Ha-Chinuch (Mitzvah 250) seem to prohibit sleight of hand on the basis that one who utilizes such techniques causes great damage because they “bring matters that are completely impossible into the realm of possibility.”[21]
The Orthodox Union, in an entry from their daily halakhah series, summarizes the position of Rav Moshe Feinstein (Iggrot Moshe Yoreh Deah 4:13) on performing magic tricks:
Why is this different than any other special talent that seems inexplicable? For example, if a person is unusually strong, would it be forbidden for him to lift a very heavy object because it might appear to the onlooker to be a supernatural feat? Why would being quick with one’s hands be any different? Therefore, Rav Moshe maintains that it is only forbidden if one pretends to be doing black magic. However, if the performer makes it clear that his tricks are sleights of hand, it is permissible according to the letter of the law. Nevertheless, Rav Moshe concludes, he does not wish to give a definitive ruling since there were many great rabbis who were strict.
Rav Moshe Shternbach (Teshuvot ve-Hanhagot 1:445) also found room for leniency under certain conditions, including an unambiguous statement that everything is accomplished using skill and sleight of hand alone. Concerned that such disclaimers may go in one ear and out the other, though, he wrote that “if the performer explains to everyone that there is no sorcery involved, only skill—and especially if they explain how the trick was done—then it appears there is no halakhic prohibition… Even so, however, it still seems proper to refrain from such activities.”
Both Rav Moshes agree that the core issue is in misleading others by convincing them or by otherwise allowing them to believe that their feats are being accomplished by supernatural means. The prohibition at least theoretically (but not necessarily in practice according to either posek!) becomes inoperative once it is clearly explained to the audience that the act in question is done by sleight of hand rather than supernaturally.
In the case of mentalism, our concern is less about belief in the supernatural and more about geneivat daat – misleading people into believing that one possesses far greater natural skill than they really do, perhaps for monetary gain. Poskim have yet to seriously address this concern in the context of magicians and mentalists, apparently because they take it for granted that when a performer explicitly says that their trick is accomplished via sleight of hand or psychological principles, that’s the full and unobstructed truth of what occurs. Given that the industry standard already pushes for disclaimers, though, it is easy to intuit that it would remain the case here.
While not in context of a teshuvah, Rav Asher Weiss has also written (Minchat Asher al HaTorah: Shemot 15) that the prohibition against performing magic tricks applies only in cases of “falsehood and deception, where one makes it appear to others as though he has done something that he has not actually done.” This reasoning would seem to apply to one who claims to be reading body language or the like, when in fact they are not, as much as it would to one claiming to be psychic or utilize real magic spells.
Furthermore, R. Weiss writes elsewhere (Minhat Asher al Ha-Torah: Vaykira 48) that “the core idea of geneva is taking something without rightful entitlement. The same applies to geneivat daat, in that a person wrongfully takes for themselves a presumption of goodwill or favor that they have not justly earned.”[22] This is a point that few authorities who discuss the use of sleight of hand to perform magic tricks grapple with; what happens in situations of metadeception, where the performer claims to be utilizing one method (say, psychology, memory, or particularly agile dexterity) but is really relying on a much simpler method or a “gimmick.” Members of their audience will have left with a higher opinion of them, and they may have left with a higher paycheck or better opportunity than they truly deserved, when the reality was far less impressive.[23]
This may even ultimately wrap back around to true monetary theft. In addressing yeshivot that were said to have cheated on their New York Regents Exams, R. Moshe Kurtz summarizes R. Moshe Feinstein’s position that such behavior is not only geneivat daat, by fabricating higher regard for such institutions than is deserved, but is also geneiva proper:
R. Feinstein explains that a potential employer might take the applicant’s academic credentials into account during the interview process. The increased score due to cheating may very well gain him the job, thereby preventing someone who actually earned it on the basis of hard work and merit. Even once hired, should the employer need to downsize, he will again grant priority to the cheater. He may even ironically think that this gifted yeshiva graduate is a man of integrity whom he would prioritize keeping in his company. Finally, the entire employment arrangement is entered under false pretenses, which is inherently problematic even absent the aforementioned factors.
A similar argument might be made here: After watching a mentalist’s unqualified presentation of body language reading or the like, people in their audience are far more likely to buy the mentalist’s book, which promises, for example, that “from getting ahead to getting what you want, the tactics I employ as a mentalist can be repurposed from entertainment to success in everyday life.”[24] When such mentalists are then also given priority slots at TED Talks, 60 Minutes features, and the like, they are further presented as genuine and quickly get ahead of others in serious speaking engagements as well as entertainment venues.
But what do disclaimers really accomplish?
There’s just one problem with all of this: disclaimers may not actually be effective in preventing problematic beliefs, as an experiment conducted by Kuhn at the University of London makes evident:
I told the students that they would be part of an experiment investigating a psychic medium. I explained that the Anomalistic Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, had a long tradition of investigating spiritualist and other paranormal claims. Although most of these claims had not held up under close scientific scrutiny, I said, we had recently found an individual who, although not perfect, had a hit rate significantly above chance. At this point, I introduced them to my friend Lee Hathaway, a professional magician…
One of our most surprising findings was that people were happy to enforce magical beliefs even when we told them Lee was a fake. Prior to seeing the demonstration, half of our participants were informed that Lee was a magician who used tricks to pretend that he was a psychic. To our absolute astonishment, this information had virtually no effect on their beliefs. Some of our participants, who just moments before had copied out instructions telling them Lee was a fraud, were fully convinced that he was a genuine psychic. We have since run several similar experiments, with similar results. It was only when we told people how the tricks had been done that they started questioning the psychic’s powers.[25]
Given the “strong correlation between people’s preexisting beliefs and the extent to which they attributed the demonstration to Lee’s genuine psychic abilities” and that those who already “believed in spiritual phenomenon were more likely to interpret the anomalous event as genuine, regardless of what they had been told beforehand,”[26] this phenomenon is perhaps all the more likely when the pseudoexplanation at hand is psychology. Recall, for example, Brown’s conviction above that pop psychology, like that espoused by Pearlman, is “the new psychic realm” for today’s generation.
For these reasons, the obligation to disclose trickery is more important for magicians and mentalists than ever. Hector Chadwick, pseudonym of one of Derren Brown’s closest consultants, has emphasized in his writings that mentalism is “one of the very few performing arts – maybe even the only one – where the audience doesn’t inherently understand the transaction.” That is to say that the reality of what the audience partakes in is ambiguous as opposed to either explicitly theatrical or objectively genuine. The mentalist’s main responsibility, therefore, ought to be “to avoid fostering a belief system you know to be false” in others. After all,
We do not yet live in a culture that can instinctively dismiss mentalism for the fiction it is, and that makes you a potential catalyst for a whole new belief system. You are compelling. You are talented and convincing enough to be an audience’s ‘proof’ that this stuff is real. You are the evidence they can cite in discussions with their friends… You may be performing ‘for entertainment purposes’ but you give credence to those whose intentions aren’t so pure. A strong performance ripples out into the world beyond the theatre; We tread a very fine line.[27]
On the subject of the efficacy or lack thereof of disclaimers, Chadwick puts it this way:
Whilst it is an issue [for people not to believe disclaimers], for our purposes it’s irrelevant to the argument. Imagine a government who refused to put up traffic lights just because some people will ignore them, or a doctor who won’t treat the sick just because the cure isn’t 100% effective. You have no control over how your audience interprets the information you give them, but that does nothing to absolve your responsibility to be honest with them. One man’s draft is another man’s ghost, and whilst we may not be able to change that, we can still let them know we opened a window.[28]
If Kuhn’s research is to be believed, disclaimers can be assumed most effective if they are accompanied by an explanation of how to do one or two of the tricks, as R. Shterbach briefly suggested in his teshuvah. This tends to be something many magicians and mentalists see as anathema to their craft, but it may be necessary to ensure the highest halakhic and ethical rigor.[29]
Where Does This Leave Us?
In our age of deepfakes and misinformation, understanding the truth matters more and more by the day. The reception of mentalism as presented by Pearlman and others serves as an important case study in how fallible human beings can be when presented by supposed experts with apparent skills while not possessing the knowledge of how to distinguish tricks from reality. The requirement of disclaiming such trickery is an important step forward in restoring intellectual honesty in the field of magic as well as broader discourse. Hopefully the ideas explored above can also be explored in other areas.
[1] Theodore Annemann, Practical Mental Magic (Dover; 1983). Page unnumbered.
[2] A shorter video debunking Pearlman’s methods was recently released by the popular sports podcaster, Pablo Torre. It can be viewed here: Debunking Oz Pearlman’s Tricks: Is He a Fraud? | PTFO
[3] Oz Pearlman, Read Your Mind: Proven Habits for Success from the World’s Greatest Mentalist (Viking 100, 2026), 3.
[4] Ibid, 4. It’s important to note that, when asked by Joe Rogan about books he would recommend to people if they are interested in learning to do what Oz does, Pearlman recommended works like Tony Corrinda’s 13 Steps to Mentalism and Theodore Annemann’s Practical Mental Effects. Both works are considered classics and clearly show that much of what he does is accomplished, despite his public claims otherwise, more through sleight of hand than sleight of mind.
[5] Gustav Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (MIT Press, 2019), 30-31
[6] Ibid, 32
[7] Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde with Sandra Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions (Henry Holt and Company, 2010), 160-161
[8] Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind (Channel 4 Books, 2007), 14-15.
[9] Ibid, 16-17
[10] Pearlman, 44-46
[11] Ibid, 25-26
[12] This is a method many magicians and mentalists are known to employ in which the trick begins before the show officially starts. Like a video editor, the magician or mentalist manipulates the narrative of the trick by using selective language to hide what was done beforehand. It does not imply that anyone other than the performer was in on the trick. Pearlman is known to utilize this method, as this podcast debriefing his appearance on The View demonstrates.
[13] Kuhn, 142. Tamariz’s style can be seen here: Juan Tamariz – Magician – The Best of Magic – 1989
[14]Kuhn, 31. Of course, this is not to say that genuine body language reading is never employed by mentalists. While body language can genuinely aid magicians and mentalists in their craft, it tends to be far more limited than Pearlman presents. Chris Michael, a successful corporate mentalist and renowned speaker on behavioral psychology, influence, and persuasion, put it this way in personal correspondence with me:
Body language has a role in mentalism, but it’s limited. Where it helps most is in tracking cognitive load and direction of thought. Typically, when you first start, you’ll only be able to determine thoughts and feelings the person is having in a binary way. But as time goes on and you train your STS, insula, and fusiform gyrus, you’ll be able to determine relative placement on a spectrum. You’re watching how hard someone is working and whether what you just said increased or reduced their cognitive load. When you’re working through a few possible outcomes, those tells help narrow things down. Signals like lip compression, small hand contractions known as digital flexion, or changes in stillness can indicate hesitation or effort. Used carefully, they help rule options in or out.
The limitation is that none of these signals are specific. The same behavior can come from different causes depending on the person and the context. A single cue is not proof of a particular thought. And each person needs to be properly baselined before you’re able to determine a deviation that tells you anything useful.
In practice, the result comes from a mix of structure, psychology, and method. Some approaches move through the shape or category of a thought step by step while watching how the person responds at each stage. The body language does not provide the answer. It confirms or rejects paths as you go.
People sometimes compare this to interrogation. In that setting, investigators often already have evidence and use it selectively to guide a conversation toward a statement that matches what they already know but get it out of the[subject] in the form of a confession. Mentalism can be similar in that using body language helps you steer the conversation. But of course it does not give direct access to someone’s thoughts.
Body language improves your odds and helps manage interaction. It does not replace method, and it does not provide certainty. Nonetheless, it’s incredibly useful if you can put in the time and dedication to learn.
[15] Banachek, Psychological Subtleties 1 (Sheridan Books, 1998), 7. An example like this is described by Hector Chadwick, pseudonym of one of Derren Brown’s close consultants:
Some years ago, I was taken aback by a clip from a TV show on a so-called “Science Channel.” The clip showed a mentalist’s performance of a book test, which it held aloft as a piece of scientific evidence for the ability to read facial cues. ‘[His] mind reading ability is not magic,’ Morgan Freeman’s dulcet voiceover informs us, ‘he’s reading tiny physical cues his subjects unwittingly give him.’ None of that is true, of course. His mind-reading ability is magic – a magic trick, to be precise. The mentalist in question backs up this view later in the same clip. ‘I think every mental thought we have has some physical corresponding emission,’ he tells us. It’s difficult to know exactly who to blame here, and there’s always a chance that no one had any intentions of misleading the viewer. Possibly the producers were unforgivably ill informed and genuinely thought the mentalist was for real. Possibly the mentalist didn’t appreciate the exact context in which his performance and interview would be used. Whatever the case and wherever the blame, the end result remains the same: presenting fiction as fact and ignorance as understanding. There is a world of difference between the theatrical use of an apparent technique and the explicit claim that your ‘powers’ are real, both during and after the show. (Hector Chadwick, “Another Man’s Ghost: On the Nature of Disclaimers” in Hector Chadwick, The Definitive Mental Mysteries of Hector Chadwick (Vanishing Inc, 2021), 221-222
While the descriptions differ slightly, this seems to be in reference to mentalist Marc Salem’s appearance on 60 Minutes.
[16] What Is Magic? | Penn & Teller Teach the Art of Magic | MasterClass. In an interview with magician and mentalist, Asi Wind, Penn added that “mentalists often don’t follow that rule. They will say they use visual cues, or watch eye movement or body language, or they’ve memorized this or calculated that, when in fact they’re using a force or an earpiece. I think that’s immoral. I think that’s wrong. I think that the audience must leave the theater not believing anything the magician knows not to be true. I think if you are not doing that, you’re doing a bad show.” (“Interview with Penn Jilette” in Asi Wind, Before We Begin (Vanishing Inc, 2021), 109).
In somewhat cruder form, “if you leave his show believing something David Blaine knows isn’t true, he thinks ‘wow, I’ve done my job.’ If you leave a Penn and Teller show believing something that I know not to be true, I think, ‘wow, I f***ed up’” (Penn Jillette (Penn & Teller) on the Difference Between Him & David Blaine as Magicians (Part 8) – YouTube ).
[17] Ibid, 9
[18] Ibid, 11.
[19] The events of Project Alpha are depicted in real time in this BBC documentary. As Randi wrote, magicians can at times be “the only element that stands between the faker and his victim. Men of science and other great intellects are without that peculiar expertise that qualifies us to detect chicanery when it is practiced on a high level.” (James Randi, The Truth about Uri Geller (Prometheus Books, 1982), 245)
[20] Ibid, 194. Australian Law student Stevie Baskin’s viral expose of Pearlman’s material, Metadeception: The Truth about Oz Pearlman as well as his subsequent debate with mentalist and psychologist Scott Barry Kaufmann on The Disagreement podcast and appearance on Pablo Torre Finds Out only seem to highlight this point.
[21] As we’ve seen above, it’s hard to say what is completely impossible when it comes to non-verbal communication. In an interview with Paul Draper of the Mentalism Center, Marc Salem (a University of Pennsylvania trained expert in non-verbal communication) shared that he is careful not to perform anything in his shows that he could not, under the best of all possible circumstances, perform without resorting to trickery. Left unsaid is that, under less than the best possible circumstances, such methods are more reliably prone to failure than success.
[22] R. Weiss further writes that, per the Maimonidean understanding of geneivat daat as related to spreading ideas that aren’t true, the prohibition ought to apply even without the intention of receiving undue positive regard. For example, he notes that Maimonides prohibits ahizat enayim (“deceiving the eyes”) not as a subcategory of kishuf (witchcraft) but as a sort of geneivat daat, even though people of the time would not afford such a practitioner positivity. We may be able to apply this same logic in our case of mentalism. That is to say that the spreading of false information about science by presenting tricks as demonstrations of reading body language, NLP, or the like, are bad merely for spreading untruth, and even without a desire by the mentalist to earn money by selling “how-to” books, giving serious lectures on the subject, or the like.
[23] A similar situation may involve cases in which the pseudoexplanation offered by the performer is quite possible, just not utilized in that instance. Here’s just one example that Kuhn provides:
Another common pseudoexplanation is the claim that the magician has extraordinary mental skills, such as super memory. Instead of claiming to read your mind or monitoring your eye movements, for example, I might look through the deck of cards pretending to memorize them all and then triumphantly reveal that the six of spades is missing. Unlike NLP or telepathy, memorizing an entire deck of cards is possible. Indeed, there is a World Memory Championship, in which Speed Cards is one category. In December 2017, Zou Lujian set a new world record by memorizing a deck of playing cards in 13.96 seconds. Memorizing an entire deck in a short amount of time is therefore not impossible, but it is still pretty challenging. Likewise, magicians may give you the impression that they have the calculating skills of a computer or the strength of an ox. Technically, such illusions are not impossible, they are just extremely unlikely (Kuhn, 31).
Such pseudoexplanations tend not to elicit responses from magicians to nearly the same degree as claims made by mentalists, but the misrepresentation of skill would seem to still be prohibited as geneivat daat.
As my friend (and copy-editor of this article) R. Michael Bernstein noted, “revealing” some of the trick and falsely attributing it to a marketable technique (while actually utilizing mere gimmickry) “is really a Jewish Ethics issue. All on its own, halakhah can be ill-equipped to deal with multifaceted, complex bluffs.”
[24] Pearlman, 4
[25] Kuhn, 58-59. Randi recounts experiencing this firsthand on the performer’s side of things:
In my appearances before many hundreds of thousands of persons in the past thirty years, I have consistently denied any possibility that what I do is done by supernatural means. Yet some of my audience will argue with me at great length that some of the illusions I’ve presented are impossible to explain by any other reasoning. Though I should certainly be the one who knows the answer to that, these people are unable to accept the obvious fact that they have not been able to solve a puzzle. (Randi, 29)
[26] Ibid.
[27] “Another Man’s Ghost: On the Nature of Disclaimers” in Chadwick, The Definitive Mental Mysteries, 220
[28] Chadwick, 223-224. One friend of mine, a fellow rabbi and magician, pointed out (as Chadwick does elsewhere in his essay) that there are no doubt some theatrical contexts in which everyone explicitly enters the space knowing they will be watching nothing but trickery, where disclaimers are unneeded. He additionally suggested that, when the disclaimer is delivered at the end of a show rather than the beginning, “one could argue that if done properly, a magic show can serve as a balm against incredulity and show people how easily they can be tricked – increasing knowledge, awareness, and wisdom. That would be magic at its moral best.”
[29] At least one Modern Orthodox posek that I personally reached out to did not seem to think this necessary. “As long as people understand that there is no such thing as real magic or mind-reading,” he wrote to me, “I don’t think it matters how it is framed or communicated. Just say at the outset something like “I want to be clear: magic isn’t real. Mind-reading isn’t real. How I do what I do is a secret. Now let me dazzle you.””
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