Allen H. Lipis' 2021 Rosh Hashanah Message

Rosh Hashanah 5782

When I was in elementary school, I had a choice of high schools. I picked one based on the many decisions I made while growing up. When I had to decide on graduate school, it was based on the values I had established over many, many years. The same was true in deciding whom to marry, and the many jobs I had available to me over my career.

The decisions I made over a lifetime, especially the important ones, were all a result of the character I built from all the very small decisions I made beforehand. It was the small decisions, the ones that didn’t seem to matter, that established my character.

I followed the advice of my parents and others growing up. I thought they could make better decisions than me when I was young, but I remembered how they decided, and that influenced my decision-making. I regularly did my homework in school. It set a pattern of behavior for many other tasks later in life. I set up a tropical fish tank and studied how fish breed. The research on tropical fish helped me to study other things I did not know much about. I got $5 from my mother, went to the bank, and exchanged the paper money for pennies, then nickels, dimes, quarters and half dollars, and looked at each coin for the date and mint mark. It taught me how to build a coin collection by being diligent and staying with a subject for a long time.

For the New Year, remember that the small decisions you make, the ones you make every day on insignificant subjects, are the ones that set your character. When an important decision has to be made, it will be determined by the many, many small ones that preceded it. There are no insignificant decisions: they all dictate just who you are.

Allen Lipis is a regular contributor to the AJT.