Powerball Dreams     

Now, I have personally never bought a lottery ticket and most likely never will. However, we all buy some sort of ticket, whether it’s to this organization’s auction or that institution’s raffle. The odds there are, granted, much higher, but still I ask: What is the sense in buying a Powerball lottery ticket when you know that your chances of winning are literally one in hundreds of millions?

Buying a lottery ticket gives you the taste of dreaming big. When someone buys a lottery ticket that could win him $1.5 billion, even though he knows his chances of winning are negligible, he cannot help but imagine that remote possibility for just a moment. He starts dreaming, maybe for merely a heartbeat, about “making it” in life. Becoming a billionaire.

And then he may start asking himself some real questions, like: What will I do with all the money I win? How much of it will go to charity? How much of it will I invest? Will I buy myself a mega-mansion? A yacht? What type of car will I buy, and how many of them? Would I rather use the money to support a new kollel? Maybe I should fund a kiruv initiative? An apartment or two in Eretz Yisrael? Or… is becoming super-rich really the “dream” after all? Maybe I need to focus on a loftier type of dream….

A person gains a lot from having dreams. I don’t mean the specific dream of becoming a billionaire. Dreams, in general, are crucial to our success — because a dreamer will, at one point or another, find himself channeling his dreams and aspirations into the realm of ruchniyus. If he catches his dreams at that critical moment and continues to direct them to growth and personal development, his lofty goals can be used to accomplish greatness in Yiddishkeit.