So I ended up doing it this way so that I could render only form errors rather than re-rendering the entire form with AJAX.  otherwise it would jumble my form elements around oddly... so since I made form errors it's own JS function in views/application/form_errors.js.erb, I defined the target here so that later I can pass other objects onto the same JS file  Let me know if you have any thoughts on why re-rendering the form with AJAX jumbles things.