While off in the Dead Sea for the last six days of Pesach, I kept myself occupied with two books: Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon and Teshuvos Minchas Usher on Hilchos Pesach (in the back of the hagadah). I read Dennett mostly while lounging poolside and Rav Usher on Shabbos and Yomtov and as chazan insurance in shul.

This caused extreme frumkeit swings in the expected directions. But these swings had nothing to do with venue. On the contrary, poolside lounging often evokes in me a certain, um, harchavas hada’as, while interminable davening usually leads to hirhurei kefira.

No, it was the reading material, but not for the obvious reasons.

Dennett’s book is a broadside against religion, the main point of which is that there are good evolutionary reasons for the emergence of proto-religious phenomena. The argument itself is debatable (and deserves its own post) but in any case is irrelevant to the truth claims of any given religion. That isn’t what did it. And Minchas Usher (at least the teshuvos section) is dry halacha, not intended as inspirational literature.

Yet, the impact of each was powerful and undeniable. This deserves explanation.

Let me give a mashal. Think of being Jewish as being in a play that lasts for centuries and has a cast of millions. It’s an avant-garde production in which the members of the audience are also participants. There’s a very old script but the actors get to ad lib a lot and, although the original printed script itself is unaltered, it is overwhelmed by the ongoing accretion of hand-written interpolations. New actors join the show and are instructed by older actors who eventually leave the show. The director is never seen.

Now when I say that my frumkeit swings upward I don’t mean that I’m reading my lines from the script more precisely. I mean that I’m into the play. This happens when the play “works”, when one can read one’s lines with a sense of authenticity, when one can sense the director’s invisible guiding hand. Often, though, this is not the case because the stars who have mastered the script and get the best lines seem to lack the subtlety of character to grasp the plot’s meaning.

Rav Usher’s teshuvos are so masterful and so attuned to the underlying meaning that my sense of identification with the play is restored. In teshuva after teshuva, he responds to questioners looking for idiotic chumrahs extending the definition of chametz (all the water in the Kineret, cigarettes, soft Sefardi matza). In each case, he goes through all the relevant sources dispassionately marshaling proofs for and against. And in each case, in the end he says the equivalent of “Oh come off it, that’s perfectly idiotic.” (BTW, although he says the “cigarettes are chametz” claim is completely without foundation, he repeats his oft-stated view that smoking is generally forbidden and certainly so on yomtov.) In other cases, he is machmir with exactly the same degree of brilliance and common sense.

As for Dennett, his book is effective not because of any argument he makes but rather because he makes you change perspective. He focuses your attention not on the stage but on the scaffolding behind the stage. That scaffolding is indeed the same for the Greatest Show on Earth and for an amateur off-off-off Broadway production. Which is exactly why it’s not where you want to be looking if you want to get into the play. It is this misdirection on Dennett’s part that really does “break the spell”.