Crowd Pleaser

Shlomo Levinger started practicing magic when he was just 14, and he gave his first performance three years later. Today, magic has become his markedly out-of-the-box parnassah. He performs at all types of shows, dinners, fundraisers, corporate events, and parties, and maintains an active online presence.

Shlomo keeps his website active with videos showing both official gigs and informal street magic like we’re watching today. Dave accompanies him everywhere and edits the content. “It’s an art,” Shlomo says. “You have to come up with the right captions and thumbnails, get the optics just right. People scroll through thousands of videos a day, so you have to catch their attention from the very first second and constantly keep it moving. Viewers are looking for something new, raw, and natural.

“Sometimes, he continues, “it works best to put people’s big reactions at the very start. People also like seeing me approach people on the street, and the suspense of wondering if they’ll agree to participate.”

He also notes that, for some reason, Jews love to watch clips of him interacting with non-Jews: “They see a different world, the way other people react to us, and the kiddush Hashem it makes to give people a lift.”

Choosing the right people to approach is an art of its own. Shlomo prefers to work with groups rather than individuals, as the wow factor is greater. He also prefers native English speakers so he doesn’t risk losses in translation. And since he wants all his videos to be appropriate for frum children (and adults), he’s selective about whom he films.

“Approaching people was scary at first — I had to get out of my comfort zone. But I learned through experience,” he says. He’s cultivated an amiable, nonthreatening demeanor as he goes over to people and asks, “Excuse me, can I ask you a question?” Once his foot is in the door, he’ll say, “I’m doing a video of some magic, would you like to see some magic tricks?” He has a ready smile for people and is funny and fast on his feet, adapting his banter to his customers.

Shlomo learned to grow a thick skin for those who give a flat no to his offer to perform. “People reject me all the time,” he says cheerfully. “I got used to it. I don’t think it’s anti-Semitic per se — this is a big city, and a lot of people are wary of strangers. Many people see Dave’s camera and don’t want to be filmed.

“But I don’t care. I tell myself I’m never going to see these people again, and that applies to my magic as well. If the trick doesn’t succeed, it’s no big deal.”

Families are usually a good bet for agreeing to participate, such as the father we spot sitting with his two sons. “Parents always tell me, ‘Yeah, the kids like to see magic.’ But more often they’re the ones who are into it,” Shlomo says as we approach.

This group, comprised of a cool-looking dad with sunglasses and boys with funky haircuts, turns out to be from Rockville, Maryland.

“Hi, would your kids like to see some magic?” Shlomo asks the father.

“Yes! Yes!” the boys pipe up.

This time Shlomo does a card trick. He shuffles a deck of cards, asks the boys to choose a card and put it back in the deck… and then magically pulls it out from under the boy’s watch band. “Wow! How’d you do that?” they say with gratifying awe. “Again?” Shlomo asks.

Again he performs a trick, and when he’s done, he shakes the dad’s hand and leaves him with a business card.

Every magician has a persona, and Shlomo’s is the guy next door who just happens to have some very cool tricks up his sleeve.

“I want to create a light energy, not something creepy,” he says. “There’s the trick, and there’s the story you’re trying to tell. Like you’ll take a card that someone chose, and all of a sudden it’s on the other side of the room. There’s suspense, then the element of surprise, but the person is also thinking about his connection to the card, or maybe his childhood.”

Attending magic shows can be halachically problematic, unless the magician makes it clear that he’s doing a trick, as opposed to having supernatural powers. Shlomo, for his part, admits that it’s all sleight of hand, and says that if he really had the power to make magic, he wouldn’t be doing card tricks on stage.

Our next audience is a group of six guys from Newark, sitting at a table eating snacks. They look like an ad for diversity hiring, with skin of different shades, some with beards and some with piercings or tattoos. Their initial skepticism gives way to friendliness as Shlomo establishes a rapport and offers to show some magic. He begins with a card trick in which he asks Joe, their volunteer, to pick a card. He chooses the eight of spades, and the card gets reshuffled into the deck. “I’m going to find your card,” Shlomo promises.

He pulls out four cards, face down, and turns them over. On each card a word is written, and together they spell “The Eight of Spades.”

“No way!” they guffaw.

“Another one?” Shlomo says.

Now he repeats the mentalist trick he did with Finn, asking Joe to choose a name from the contacts in his phone and lock it. He looks at Joe, pretending to search his mind, and when he correctly guesses “Ethan!” his crowd goes wild. So wild, in fact, that a patrolman comes over to see what all the commotion is about. To get on his good side, Shlomo does a card trick for him, too. The tall Black patrolman grins and shakes his head. “Sick,” he comments.

Shlomo grins. “I came here before with a Flatbush camp for older boys, called Ahavas Yisrael, and let them watch my street magic,” he says. “All the cops were freaking out when they saw my stuff.”

The Making of a Magician

Shlomo Levinger and his four siblings grew up in Kew Gardens, Queens, and the boys attended Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim.

He was the sort of kid who always liked to learn new things, and who loved a challenge. He learned to stand on his head, to juggle, to ride a unicycle. If something intrigued him, he’d go after it full force.

When he was young, his father, Rabbi Chaim Levinger, currently a teacher in Yeshivas Orchos Chaim in Lakewood and the author of several seforim, once brought a talmid named Avi Hoffman home. Hoffman did some magic tricks; it was the first time Shlomo saw magic being done close up, and it planted the first seeds of his interest. Shlomo was looking for some extra activities when he entered high school, and began to dabble in magic tricks.

“It was a good age to start,” he maintains. “I was old enough to understand the analyses of the trick and appreciate them. What I was learning would have been too complex for a younger child.

“It’s important for kids to have an outlet. At the time, of course, I had no idea it would become a profession.”

He relied a lot on video tutorials to get started, (“I’m a visual learner, so it was good for me”) and as time went on, paid for books and online seminars.

As he learned from other magicians, he built on what he saw to develop his own personal style. He strives for a natural, non-gimmicky presence, a laid-back vibe.

“Magic has a kind of innate corniness to it,” he says. “I don’t feel the need to add gimmicks.”

Figuring out magic techniques, he says, trained him to think in a different way, to understand how to break down each trick. For example, imagine he places the box from the cards on the table as he begins his trick. “Maybe that’s not a random gesture,” he suggests. “Maybe I need it to be there for the trick.”

Mastering even simple sleight-of-hand tricks requires many long hours of practice, and he worked on that before moving on to mentalism stunts.

“Mentalism isn’t harder than card tricks,” he says. “All of it is still just a trick. Instead of sleight of hand, it’s sleight of mind. There’s a method to it, skills you have to learn and practice.” His studies have deepened his appreciation for the technique of other magicians, in the same way a person who plays an instrument appreciates music more fully than a non-musician.

While Shlomo’s yeshivah had a no-cards rule, his rebbi was willing to look the other way. “I won’t say anything if you’ll show me a trick,” he said. In the end, his first gig was a performance at a Chanukah party hosted by his rebbi’s parents.

“I was supposed to perform for forty minutes, but I was so focused on getting the tricks and the show right that I finished in twenty,” he remembers. “But they paid me fifty dollars for it, so it was the first time I made money for doing what I loved.”

After that, he started performing in the summers when he was at his father’s bungalow upstate, learning as he went along. He didn’t have a car, so he would hitchhike to his gigs (given that he was only making $200 per show, if he even got paid, he didn’t want to spend a quarter of the take on taxis). He performed in many camps and bungalow colonies back then, sometimes for free, building a name for himself, with his reputation and his skills growing gradually and organically.

Shlomo later attended beis medrash in Waterbury, where his rebbi, Rabbi Avi Oberlander a”h, who was tragically niftar a year ago at age 46, gave him tremendous support and encouragement.

“Rabbi Oberlander helped me see that performing magic could be a positive thing,” he says. “You can do it the right way and make a kiddush Hashem.” The two developed a close relationship.

When Shlomo and his wife Shani had their first child a month ago, after three years of marriage, the doctors had some concerns about the baby’s health and kept him in the NICU for a while. The day of his release six days later (with a clean bill of health, baruch Hashem) coincided with Rabbi Oberlander’s yahrzeit. “That felt like a nod from Shamayim,” Shlomo says. “A week later, at the bris, we named the baby Avi after him.”

The flexibility of a performer’s schedule has allowed Shlomo to continue his learning. Since leaving Waterbury, he started learning in Yeshiva of Far Rockaway in a chaburah led by Rabbi Dovid Kleinkaufman, designed for men who are working part time, and now learns one-on-one with a chavrusa in the mornings.

Team Player

Shlomo, a lifelong baseball fan, was  thrilled when Mike Trout of the L.A. Angels saw a video of his and invited him to perform for him and the guys in California. It was a dream come true, he says.

“They flew us to Los Angeles, and Mike told us to come to the back parking lot after the game,” Shlomo relates. “I was so nervous I could barely concentrate on watching the game. But once I started doing tricks, I just went into the zone of performing, and the nervousness dropped away.”

He hung out with Mike and some of his teammates for an hour, doing magic while Dave filmed. After that, other athletes saw the clips and began reaching out. Since then, Shlomo has performed for the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Astros, the Giants, the Mets, and even the Nashville Predators (an ice hockey team), garnering for himself the moniker “the athletes’ magician.”

He maintains an admirable sangfroid as he addresses these sports celebrities, many of whom dwarf him physically (and Shlomo’s not particularly short). He says it’s so much fun, and such terrific publicity, that he doesn’t charge the teams for his shows outside his travel expenses.

The shows that he does in venues like dinners or parties generally run about an hour, and require a higher level of structure. He has to play everything larger and project a steady aura of confidence, something he’s grown into over the years.

Perhaps one advantage of being a frum magician is that Shlomo doesn’t have much competition. He estimates that there are no more than ten other frum guys who perform. His old yeshivah buddy Rabbi Yehuda Rauch was an early fellow hobbyist who used to practice tricks with Shlomo during learning breaks. Today he’s a rebbi in Orlando.

“He’s one of the best magicians I know, but he doesn’t do shows for the public,” Shlomo says, “although he sometimes does magic for his class. You might call him my ‘magic rebbi,’ since I often consult with him on magic projects I’m working on.”

Another friend, Rabbi Uriel Nashofer, used to perform with him, but also gave up performing to pursue a career as a rabbi in Memphis.

Professionally, Shlomo has mostly forged his own path. There are associations of professional magicians, such as the International Magicians Society, but he never joined. Every summer there’s a MAGIC Live conference in Las Vegas, but he hasn’t yet carved out the time to go. He does meet colleagues in Tannen’s, New York’s oldest operating magic shop on 34th Street, where magicians come to hang out and jam. Shlomo has made friends in his field there, including a few frum ones.

He’s always seeking to up his game. In magic, he explains, there are two ways to be original: You can take existing concepts and tweak them into your own original routine, or you can create original props or gimmicks. Shlomo aims for both. His routine is, of course, proprietary, but he has also crafted a few bespoke props, some of which have only been shared with magician friends, such as a tool that helps him read minds. He also invented a playing card that turns into a dollar bill, and a technique for linking rubber bands together that he’s never seen anyone else do. “I’m trying to be creative all the time,” he says.

Over the past ten years he’s learned that as with any art form — writing, visual art, music — success depends on much more than talent. An artist not only needs to master his technique, but to find the right way to present and market it, as well as learn to manage the business end.

“You have to figure out the value of what you offer, and price your shows based on the response and what makes sense,” he says.  “But I’m so grateful to be able to make my living doing what I love.”

Secret of the Pile:Shlomo Shares a Card Trick

O

ne of my favorite effects involves nothing but a deck of cards, a sealed envelope, and a moment of pure astonishment.

I hand the spectator a very ordinary deck of cards and instruct them to shuffle it as much as they like. I also show them a sealed envelope, marked with a question mark. I tell them it contains a prediction I made earlier.

Once the person is satisfied the deck is mixed, I ask him to deal the cards face down onto the table, one at a time. I tell him, ‘Don’t overthink it — just deal them into a pile, messy is fine.’ He deals freely and stops whenever he likes, with no influence, no pressure.

When he stops, I casually toss him the envelope and say, ‘Go ahead, open it.’ He picks it up and pulls out the prediction. It reads: ‘You will stop at the four of hearts.’

Then comes the moment of truth. I ask him to turn over the card he stopped at, and somehow, it’s the four of hearts!

Everyone is stunned. It doesn’t make sense. The guy shuffled, he dealt. He stopped randomly. I never touched anything. Yet my prediction was perfect.

So how does it work? Let’s lift the curtain.

The deck is normal. The shuffle is real. The dealing and stopping point were genuinely the spectator’s choice.

The secret lies in one simple preparation and one invisible moment.

Before the trick starts, I secretly remove the four of hearts from the deck and hide it underneath the envelope — not inside, just tucked under it, out of view. The envelope is sealed and seems untouched.

Once the spectator stops dealing, I say, “I want you to open this,” and casually toss the envelope towards him, making sure it lands directly on top of his dealt pile. That’s the moment the trick happens.

As the envelope lands, the hidden four of hearts quietly slides off and falls on top of the pile. That’s the card he’ll soon turn over. To make the moment more convincing, I take a small step back as I toss the envelope. I raise my hands slightly, as if to say, “I’m done, you take it from here.” That illusion of distance is everything. It makes it feel like I’m completely hands-off, like I couldn’t have interfered if I tried.

Meanwhile, the person is focused on opening the envelope. He removes the prediction, reads it, and is already reacting to the boldness of the claim. I say, “Go on, turn over the card you stopped on.”

He flips the top card on his messy pile and finds the four of hearts. Because the pile isn’t neat, the loaded card doesn’t stand out. The envelope came from me but was opened by him, so he feels in control, and since I stepped away it feels like I never touched anything.

That’s the beauty of this effect. It’s not sleight of hand, it’s about subtle timing, natural gestures, and giving the illusion of freedom, while everything secretly leads to the one outcome I had in mind the whole time.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1073)