• This is provably false. The brain of an infant is still substantially undeveloped at birth, and is still growing rapidly and making an immense number of neural connections, in the eighth order of magnitude, during the first year. Brains continue to change all through childhood and then are profoundly altered in their operation by the immense flood of hormones that commences at puberty. The de-biologizing of human beings, as I have pointed out before, is a major source of error in social theory.

• No doubt there is, as one recent book on infant behavior your rabbi hasn't read puts it, a scientist in the crib. But that doesn't mean an infant thinks like an adult, much less that an adult is an infant who has done more studying and acquired more inhibitions. That's an absurd view of human psychological development.

All I want Is Security

• More bromides. Your reader is not a consumer of pabulum, but a realist living in a world that contains phenomena that cognitively appear as threats and opportunities. If this is the best that can be said in favor of the value of change, it's no wonder that the guys who pay the rabbi to ramble this way are sticking to the tax partnerships they got when they were young that enabled them to buy all those dishwashers.

• Wonderful advice, if only you could control the "means," which you can't. The firm is not a means to your ends, it's a means to the ends of those who pay you a fixed sum for all your time, and then resell that time by the hour at a multiple. Because their incentives are directly opposed to yours, in order for this "means" to serve you, you must find a way to make it not serve the partners. And that's hard to do, because they have total power in a totalizing institution. So the advice, like most of the rest of the smoke your source was blowing out his tukhus, is fine in fairy tales, but has nothing to do with real life.

• Promises, promises. Why should people merely promise themselves that they will magically possess the ability to do that which most people never succeed in losing their fear enough to undertake? We should, surely, have counsel for people that doesn't ask them simply to ignore the odds, rather than change them.

• Here's the fulfillment of the inadequacy of the infant metaphor. It's just more mush, not an analysis that would give someone making complex life choices a way to think effectively about the real alternatives.

I Haven't Thought For Myself Since The 8th Grade!

• There was no Ark; that's a folktale from the prehistoric inundation of the Euxine. The Titanic was built by professionals, as were its sisters Olympic and Britannic, both of which were great successes. We now know that the Titanic suffered from inadequate iron rivets delivered to the builders, who used them in the knowledge that steel rivets would have been better, but there were not enough available to use over the entire hull. So what does the comparison between a boat that did not exist and one built by professionals making the best they could of available materials prove?

• This essay seems to me not to succeed either in the task of providing useful realistic advice about career, or in responding to the assignment, which was to write an essay on an idea of your own. You have reproduced some choice cliches from an inspirational homily offered by a seventy-four year old rabbi who is grossly ignorant of the world in which we live. What he doesn't know about the problems faced by your colleagues, and how one might go about using a contemporary mind to deal with them, would fill a book: the book of our readings, for example, or indeed any other attempt to demonstrate how to combine many forms of modern learning in the social and natural sciences to create a view of social action that lawyers can use on their own and the clients' behalf. The very idea of our undertaking is denied by the kind of "modernity" that is in his Modern Orthodoxy, let alone his not-so-modern facets. You can pass the Bar exam without knowing much about the world, as he did, and you can decide what constitutes a kosher hot dog without much understanding of chemistry, as he purported to do, but writing plywood-and-formica popular history with lavish illustrations for frummy coffee tables is enough to disqualify anyone from too great a reputation for wisdom. He's a historian pour rire.

• The solution is to leave Berel Wein to the kind consideration of the Litvak Hall of Fame Admissions Committee, and write about an idea of yours subjected to the most stringent self-criticism of which you are capable.