Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz

but he is involved normally in things that are useful and beneficial to society, but every once in a while he does things that are not beneficial to society.

He watches a sports game, he gambles a little bit, so then it would not passul him le'edos.

It should be pointed out that the Rambam writes that a person should only be osek kol yamav,

in things that are beneficial to society.

And, you know, one would imagine that if doing something enough times would make you Pasula Edus, then you probably shouldn't even do it a little, especially if it's the kind of thing that is known to be a very addictive kind of behavior, because doing it a little is likely going to lead you to doing it a lot.

And especially when it comes to gambling, where we know, unfortunately, from experience, that very, very often, more often than we would care to admit, it becomes so addictive that it ruins people's lives and people's families.

And we're not always able to identify who has an addict's addiction.

you know, brain makeup, and who doesn't, you know, who's going to become addicted, who's not going to become addicted.

It's important to read the room a little bit over here, you know, look around at society, look around at the Jewish people.

You wouldn't invite an alcoholic for drinks and tell him, don't worry, it'll just be one glass of wine, just drink with us.

You know, and our dear friend, Rabbi Larry Rothwax, recently interviewed

Shemi Feintuch, who's an expert in addictions, about this very issue.

He interviewed him for our Ritz Rabbinic podcast, so it's not available to the public, but it's available to people with Smicha from our yeshiva.

And he said, I forget the exact stat, but he said when it comes to the kinds of gambling where you have this instant payoff,

and this instant rush, something like 29% of people will become addicted, some extremely, extremely high amount.

And once you become addicted, gambling is an extremely dangerous addiction.

People think, you know, if you're addicted to cocaine, that's extremely dangerous.

What's going to be so dangerous about gambling?

Well, you could lose your family, your house, everything.

And people are, you know, Dr. Feintok was saying, people are in debt, not like tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, kids in debt by this.