Solomon Grossman [September 5, 2020] Parshat Ki Tavo
Shabbat Shalom, everyone.
At the beginning of my Torah Portion, Ki Tavo, from the book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells the Jews to do certain things when they get to Israel, like setting aside some food, writing stuff down, covering rocks in plaster, things like that. Then Moses says a list of things you shouldn’t do, like insulting your parents, murdering someone in secret, misdirecting a blind person, and other things that most people wouldn’t do anyway. After that, Moses says that if you follow all of the rules, God will give the Israelites a few blessings, but if you don’t follow the rules, 98 curses will fall upon you. I’m obviously not going to list them all here, but some are pretty brutal, such as the ones saying that you will be forced to eat the flesh of your children, you will be driven to madness, and your corpse will be food for the birds. After that long list of curses, Moses essentially says just to respect God, because God led them through the desert, and if God didn’t do that, we wouldn’t be here today.
While studying my Torah Portion, I was surprised by that fact that there are so many curses, yet so few blessings. Normally, people want to think that reinforcing good behavior (blessings) is more effective than punishing ill behavior (curses). But if this is really true, why would God use the opposite strategy? Why would God decide to frighten the Israelites with all the curses, rather than entice them with the reward of blessings?
Research has shown that reinforcement of good behavior is more effective than punishing bad behavior, especially in the long term. But of course, much of this research didn’t happen until recently. Remember that schools used punishment all the time. Spanking was completely normal, and schools still use detention and referrals as a form of punishment. On the other hand, in the younger grades, reinforcement is much more popular. We used to get gold stars, stickers, and sometimes, if we were good, we would even get a class party with snacks and games.
Reinforcement and punishment are both forms of something called ‘operative conditioning.’ A common misconception people have is thinking that ‘positive’ always means ‘good’ and ‘negative always means ‘bad,’ but in this case, positive means adding and negative means subtracting. Therefore, when you are adding stimulus (e.g., giving them candy,) as a result of good behavior, and is resulting in happy feelings, it is called positive reinforcement. On the other hand, when you take away stimulus (e.g., taking away chores,) and it still results in happy feelings, then it’s called negative reinforcement. Positive punishment, which is adding stimulus, (e.g. giving them detention). Negative punishment is taking away stimulus (e.g. taking away their video games). This subject isn’t easy to understand, and it’s much easier to understand with a chart, but I hope I gave you an idea of the differences between all four types of operative conditioning.
I personally believe that a mixture of both punishment and reinforcement help to form good habits and help us to be good people. This made me think of training our two cats. One of our cats really liked to meow at us in the morning to wake us up. Which was very annoying. Especially at 4:00 a.m. My dad somehow got the idea of dropping a heavy book in the morning, at the door where he meowed, which would make a loud noise and scare the cats away. After a week, they were completely trained, and never meowed at the door (in the morning) again. Another story also came to mind that involved training the cats. I thought it would be funny if I could teach one of them to stand on his hind legs, and also to sit. I did this by giving him a treat directly after every time he did the trick. Now he is also completely trained with that, and he gets it every time. But I still give him treats because it’s fun. Both of these strategies work, and so, after doing some research, I realized that both punishment and reinforcement can be effective, and both should be used appropriately. In the case of my Torah portion, punishment may have been more effective, although I believe that a balance of reinforcement and punishment is necessary in order to live a good, ethical, life. Even though punishment was used in this Torah portion, reinforcement was probably used at other places in the Torah, like when Jacob had to work for seven years in order to marry Rachel. Jacob knew that if he worked well, he would get a reward (the permission to marry Rachel). At the end of the day, the thing that matters most is the end result, not the way that you get there. It’s more important that we do good things and live good lives, rather than the way that we discipline ourselves to do those things.