Extinguishing Negative Behaviors

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Last month an article in the New York Times: “What Shamu Taught Me About A Happy Marriage” caught my eye. A journalist, Amy Sutherland, described her trips from Boston to California to watch exotic animal trainers at work. She observed their techniques of rewarding positive behavior, beginning at first with any approximation of the desired outcome. A baboon does not learn to flip on command in one session and so one first rewards a hop, then a bigger hop, and so on. She noticed that animal trainers learn all they can about a species and work with its natural social structure, likes and dislikes. Good trainers don’t blame the animals but go back to look more carefully at their own behaviors. She learned about incompatible behaviors- that is when a trainer wanted to teach an African crested crane to stop landing on his head, he went about teaching it to land on a special mat on the ground. This made the undesirable behavior impossible as one couldn’t land on the mat and on his head simultaneously. Finally she learned LRS, least reinforcing syndrome. It is felt that any response, positive or negative reinforces a behavior, and so when the dolphin did something wrong at Sea World in San Diego, the trainer did not nag or scold, but stood still for a few beats, carefully not looking at the dolphin.

When Amy returned to Boston she wondered if these techniques would work on the rare and exotic species found in her home, the American husband, and she discovered that they did. She began by using positive reinforcement to encourage her husband to pick up dirty clothes from the floor. She came up with incompatible behaviors for those things that drove her crazy in the kitchen, and finally, by ignoring his fussing when he lost his keys, she was able to extinguish a negative behavior that had ruined many a lovely morning.

In this week’s Torah portion, the idea of ignoring a negative behavior in order to eliminate it, comes up in the commentaries in a surprising way. The text, Deuteronomy 12 verses 2-3 urges the Israelites to destroy the idolatrous shrines of the nations which they will find upon entering the land of Israel. It reads in part: Tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their names from that site.” Perhaps this was considered essential at the time the Israelites, an unsophisticated desert people, entered Canaan, whose superior material culture was sure to be enticing, but the idea of destroying the places of worship of other people is abhorrent to us today and interestingly bothered Jewish commentators for as long as we have written records. Already in the second century Rabbi Ishmael reinterpreted this text dramatically. The passage does not mean that you should destroy other nation’s worship sites, he taught, but rather it is a warning to the Jewish people not to worship idols in their sanctuary, lest it be destroyed. In the middle ages, the impact of this text was drastically diminished by the rabbinic authorities declaring the two religions with which the Jewish people were interacting at that time, Islam and Christianity, monotheistic and thus not idolatry.

In the early 20th century the Hertz Chumash, familiar to many of us from our childhoods, took a different approach. Rabbi Hertz asks, How do you destroy their names? He then answers, the very memory of the local Baals will cease, by our ignoring them. Their power, like the power of other objects of idolatrous adoration, comes from the hold they have on our minds, and so ignoring them destroys them.

Ann Rubin Goldman, an educator at the Reform congregation in Tampa Florida, writing about this for “Living Torah” suggests that we apply Rabbi Hertz’s approach to contemporary Jewish life. She suggests that rather than bemoaning and criticizing all that is wrong with American Jewish practice we focus on reinforcing the positive. She urges that we worry less about Jews for Jesus and other missionary activities and more about making Shabbat meaningful for our communities, that we spend less time scolding our families for putting up Christmas trees or other perceived breaches of appropriate behavior and more into creating the experiences that will give them good reasons to continue Jewish traditions.

Jewish life is indeed a behavior that can be extinguished merely by ignoring it, each unmarked holiday and life cycle event, each overlooked mitzvah, another step towards its disappearance. A Bar and Bat Mitzvah like this morning is just the opposite, it is the warm and positive experience that reinforces all the study and commitment that lead to today, with warm memories to continue in our hearts for years to come.