The Talmud teaches that only certain people may testify as witnesses. When they testify, they must take an “oath of testimony” where one is sworn to give testimony on something that he saw or knew. But this only applies those who are eligible to give testimony. Among those who are excluded are a king and a gambler.
יומא עד,א
שְׁבוּעַת הָעֵדוּת אֵינָהּ נוֹהֶגֶת אֶלָּא בִּרְאוּיִין לְהָעִיד. וְהָוֵינַן בַּהּ: לְמַעוֹטֵי מַאי? רַב פָּפָּא אָמַר: לְמַעוֹטֵי מֶלֶךְ.
רַב אַחָא בַּר יַעֲקֹב אָמַר: לְמַעוֹטֵי מְשַׂחֵק בְּקוּבְיָא. וְהָא מְשַׂחֵק בְּקוּבְיָא — מִדְּאוֹרָיְיתָא מִיחְזֵי חֲזֵי, וְרַבָּנַן הוּא דְּפַסְלוּהוּ,
If one who is ineligible to testify swears an oath to give testimony, the oath is invalid even if he does not testify. And we discussed it: The statement: Those who are eligible to give testimony, comes to exclude what? After all, it was already said that the oath does not apply to women, relatives, and other disqualified people. Rav Pappa said: It comes to exclude a king. A king is not disqualified from giving testimony, but he does not testify before a court, due to the requirement to give respect to a king.
Rav Aha bar Ya’akov said: It comes to exclude a gambler [lit “one who plays with dice,”] whom the Sages disqualified from giving testimony. But surely one who plays with dice is eligible by Torah law to give testimony, and it is the Sages who disqualified him. Despite this, an oath of testimony does not apply to him by Torah law, even though the prohibition on his testifying is rabbinic.
According to Rashi, the gambler cannot be a legal witness because he is in the same category as a thief. Since no gambler places a bet knowing they will loose, any money that is lost is lost without the gambler’s true consent.(רשי: דהוי גזלן מדרבנן ופסול לעדות:) It is, in this way, stolen. And just as a thief cannot be a legal witness neither can a gambler.
Is gambling a disease?
“Compulsive gambling, also called gambling disorder,” says the Mayo Clinic’s Patient Information Website, “ is the uncontrollable urge to keep gambling despite the toll it takes on your life.” In the 2021 International Classification of Diseases (ICD), Pathological or Compulsive Gambling disorders are coded as F63.0, though they may also be coded as Z72.6 (a problem related to lifestyle). Excessive gambling was first officially recognized as a psychiatric disorder in the ninth edition of the International Classification of Diseases in 1977. Three years later it was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, third edition (DSM-III) which is used by the American Psychiatric Association. But why should gambling be classified as a disease rather than a fun night out at best, or a moral failing at worst?
As a group of specialists in addictive behavior pointed out, there are several features that are common to both drug addiction and gambling. They include similarities of reward processing which are distinct from impulse control disorders. In impulse control disorders, any “reward” is based on negative reinforcement: people have a feeling of relief after the act. In sharp contrast, substance-induced addictions and gambling offer positive reinforcement, (at least in the early stages of the disease process), when people report a “kick” or a state of “flow”. It is only later in the process that compulsive features and negative reinforcement predominate.
And then there is evidence that suggests “that individuals with gambling or substance use disorders exhibit a hypo-responsive reward circuitry. These results support the view that dopaminergic dysfunction constitutes a common feature of both substance-related and behavioral addictions.”
There is more evidence that dopamine dysfunction is involved in pathological gambling, and it comes from patients with Parkinson’s disease. When some patients are treated with medications that block dopamine in order to control the symptoms, there can be an unfortunate side effect: a sudden onset of gambling together with other reward-driven behaviors, including compulsive shopping and hypersexuality. Pathological gamblers also show “cognitive distortions” during gambling, that change how the gambler thinks about randomness, chance, and skill, and lead him or her to have an inappropriately high expectation of winning during the game.
Overview of possible disorder categories and central research findings in relation to for “Pathological Gambling.”
Abbreviations: IFC: inferior frontal cortex; PFC: prefrontal cortex.
From Fauth-Bühler M, Mann K, Potenza MN. Pathological gambling: a review of the neurobiological evidence relevant for its classification as an addictive disorder. Addict Biol. 2017 Jul;22(4):885-897.
There is much more research to support the suggestion that pathological gambling is a brain disorder. If you need to recall one fact about the whole business, it is this: Compared with a matched control population, pathologic gamblers have more brain injuries, more fronto-temporo-limbic neuropsychological dysfunctions and more EEG abnormalities, which supports the hypothesis that addictive gambling may be a consequence of brain damage, especially of the frontal and limbic systems.
“For most people, gambling is a relaxing activity with no negative consequences. However, others develop excessive behaviour: gambling becomes a disorder or an addiction that manifests itself as an irrepressible impulse to wager money. The activity has negative consequences and dominates the lives of those suffering from pathological gambling. Among other things, excessive gambling leads to the spending of ever-increasing sums of money and creates important personal, familial, occupational, and social problems”
Leon de ModEna. Rabbi. teacher. Gambler.
Leon de Modina (1571–1648) was an important rabbi who lived in Italy. He wrote a number of works including Bet Lechem Yehuda, an ethical treatise Tzemach Tzedek, and a book that questioned the authenticity of the Zohar called Ari Nohem. He was also a pathological gambler, whose addiction caused him no end of misery. His autobiography has been published in English, and it is a fascinating and depressing read. In 1608 Leon wrote that as he gambled, “my behavior became so wild that I agreed to go and live away from Venice” (Cohen 105.) In 1620 things got even worse:
During the autumn of 5381 [1620] I also engaged in evil, losing everything by playing games of chance. As a result I was obliged to extend my term of burdensome employment…I am troubled and distressed with many debts…May God take pity on me. (Ibid 116.)
Not surprisingly his son Isaac also began to gamble, “and treading a bad path” (ibid 142.) For Isaac things continued to decline. Around the summer of 1638, Leon noted that his son “began to transgress greatly. Instead of earning money to provide food for his family, as a man should, from morning to evening he played games of chance, mad though they may be…He forsook his family, left his wife lonely, and went to Livorno and from there to Amsterdam…He could have lived peacefully and quietly in his home…But he vanished and has not been seen here …as he wanders about the earth” (idib 150).
Leon’s incessant gambling brought him continued financial hardship.
During the winter [of 1625] I lost so much money playing games of chance that I was compelled at Passover to take a loan of 152 ducats from the members of the Ashkenazic Torah Study Society…to be deducted six ducats a month from my salary, in order to pay my debts. I vowed not to play games of chance until the money was fully deducted, which would take twenty-five months. Today a year has gone by without income and without students and earnings. I do not know how…how I shall find some teaching, or whence will come my help. if not from God in heaven” (idid 129-130).
And so it continued. Mark Cohen, who translated and edited the autobiography, wrote that “Modena also pursued gambling for reasons other than financial gain; the stakes for which he played were enough to ruin him but not enough to raise his socioeconomic status in a significant way….At the gambling table he tried to make up for the deficiencies he felt in his position in his life and his abilities. Whether he won or lost, he could do it in a big way” (ibid 43). Leon was a classic case of ICD F63.0
In a thoughtful review of the consequences of pathological gambling, the psychiatrist Robert Ladouceur noted that “false beliefs of those who gamble can lead to chasing losses, changes in mood, withdrawal, deceitfulness, and important negative consequences. These changes at the individual level, coupled with the large financial loss, can be expected to affect the family life, employment, and social life of the gambler.” He could have been describing the arc of the life of Leon de Modena as well as that of Isaac his son. And at least in this respect, the findings of modern psychiatry support the rabbinic decision to disallow the legal testimony from a gambler, since the gambler is inherently unreliable.
Whence Free Will?
Still, the claim that the pathological gambler has a disease rather than a moral failing has many implications. Perhaps the most important of these is that with this understanding it makes as much sense for the gambler to repent for his lifestyle as it does for a patient with breast cancer to repent for her malignancy. In neither case is it the fault of the one with the illness. Elsewhere on Talmudology we have discussed how our understanding of the biochemical basis of our behaviors, whether based on genetics or trauma or neuropharmacology, is also challenging some of the traditional Jewish notions of free will and responsibility. The pathological gambler brings these questions into focus. Sin requires free will. And free will is rapidly becoming a troubled notion.
Let’s end with the most poetic, and most memorable criticism of the charge that our behavior lies outside of our control. It was penned by William Shakespeare in King Lear (Act I scene ii):
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!
“Psychiatric classifications have traditionally recognized a number of conditions as representing impulse control disorders. These have included pathological gambling, intermittent explosive disorder, kleptomania, pyromania, and trichotillomania.”
