Render Reckoning

By the end of next week, I should have all my required documents in hand and I will be ready to plunge into one of the beloved annual rituals of American life, filling out Form 1040, the income tax return. Or, I should say, returns since I also have to do one for the State of Maryland. In addition, I also help my son with his returns as well as my mom so come April 15 I will have completed six tax returns. Some years I have completed up to eight. 

Of all the arcane knowledge stored in my brain, one of the seemingly most random collections is the skillset needed to complete my federal and state income tax returns. I do them myself and for the most part always have except for a few years when my confidence was shaken from having made a mistake that led the IRS to think that I owed thousands of dollars of unpaid tax. An accountant friend got it straightened out for me and I let her do my tax return for a while.  When she retired, I went back to doing it myself. 

This year, the process will be slightly simpler for me as this is the first time I won’t need to file in both Maryland and New York since 2015. Likewise, my son, will only need to file in one state (one year he had to file in three states plus Federal!). But they will still be plenty complicated for an average citizen. 

I first became aware of the need to file a tax return sometime in the early 70s. In late March or early April, my dad would take over the dining room table for 2-3 days. The tension emanating from that room was so thick you could cut it with an electric adding machine (he had one). Whatever it was he was doing, it looked stressful!

I filled out my own tax return for the first time around 1980 using the Form 1040 EZ using a number 2 pencil and one of those new-fangled calculators. It only took an hour or so and I am pretty sure I got a refund. 

As I got older my tax situation got more complicated and US tax law became increasingly obtuse. Today, the return must account for local taxes we paid, charitable deductions, inheritance of tax deferred accounts, earnings and expenses from my wife’s business, and investment gains and losses, which further must be sorted into long-term, and short-term dividends and interest, each of which is taxed differently. Mortgage interest is deductible but other loan interest (not that I have any) is not. Thank goodness I don’t have to worry about reporting gambling winning or losses! But soon, I will have to determine the tax due on withdrawals from my retirement accounts and maybe on up to 85 percent of my Social Security income. 

When I completed last year’s returns for Uncles Sam and his nieces Maryland and New York, the PDF file of all my returns was 478 pages - all for what amounts to a very modest amount of taxable income. It is understandable that many are happy to turn over tax preparation to a 3rd party and to pay them to do it. I wouldn’t even be able to consider doing it myself without a computer and the most popular software, TurboTax. Even then the amount of information one needs is staggering. (Intuit, the company that makes TurboTax actively lobbies Congress to prevent changes to tax law that would make it easier or simpler to file your taxes! By using TurboTax I am literally paying to keep my taxes mind-bogglingly complex. 

Here are some of the questions I find myself looking up every year:

·      What is the maximum contribution we can make to a Roth IRA?

·      At what income levels do the contributions phase out? 

·      Can we itemize my deductions or should we take the standard deduction?

·      What is the limit on deductions for the local tax I paid?

·      Can I take a deduction for our home office? 

·      How much can I contribute to my Health Savings Account? 

·      How much Social Security tax will we owe on my wife’s self-employment income? 

·      Did I pay enough in estimated taxes last year to avoid penalties? 

How did our tax code get to be so complicated? Even with the software and my decades of experience, I am always afraid I will forget something or that a 1099 got lost in the mail or that I neglected to report some minor bit of income and that as a result the IRS will come and impound my 1st Edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking or my vintage Matchbox cars (warning Mr. Taxman, they are kind of musty).

Doing your own taxes comes with risks. A few years ago, my employer didn’t properly report my state withholding and I got a bill from the state of Maryland for $5,000. Without an accountant, I had to deal with it myself and ending up having to fax (yes, fax) all of my pay vouchers for the previous year to the state. Eventually, the error was fixed and they sent my refund several months and many headaches later. (My wife says that actually it was she who resolved this, which seems quite plausible.)

Having said that, I kind of like doing my taxes the way some enjoy a crossword puzzle or Wordle. There is something satisfying about figuring out where all the figures on those pieces of paper go, and it is the only time I am rewarded for my meticulous bookkeeping throughout the year because I am able to retrieve all the required information by running a few reports. I enjoy electronically submitting my file and getting that upbeat text message saying that the IRS has accepted my return. (It’s like the 21st century equivalent of offering up a goat to a hungry and jealous God except that you actually get a response.)

Still, it feels like it shouldn’t be like this for a couple with one income and a pretty simple situation. No real estate other than our home, no foreign investments, no venture capital funds, no oil wells or pork belly futures. I have a little crypto that I could sell (if I could find my password) but nothing more exotic and yet… 478 pages of tax return last year! In most countries the government figures out your taxes for you and withholds the proper amount from your paycheck or just tells you what you owe. And yes, I can understand why we would not want our kind uncle to do that on our behalf. I have more confidence in my ability to figure it out than in his. 

To be clear, I am not someone who complains about paying taxes. Indeed, I am continually astonished at just how low taxes in the US are and how much we get for them. The national parks alone are worth what I pay every year especially now that my wife has a Senior Pass entitling her (and whomever is with her) to enter every national park for free for the rest of her life. We really do want to pay our fair share. I just wish it were a little easier to figure out exactly how much that is. 

Uncommon Hours

“Cheshire Puss, would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” 
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

–Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

“…if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which [one] has imagined [one] will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

–Walden, Henry David Thoreau

When began my work at University of Rochester Hillel in July of 2015, my only Rochester-based board member, Rick Goldstein (also known as the Mayor of Jewish Rochester), generously introduced me to members of the community that he thought might be able to help our struggling organization. One of the people he introduced me to that first month was an older gentleman who was a local businessman of not insignificant means. We’ll call him Harvey (not his real name). Harvey was as different from me as two people can be. He was old enough to be my father, a Republican, a Trump supporter, and much more socially conservative. Though Harvey had not supported our Hillel for many years, Rick thought there was a chance he might do so again in the future and thought my meeting him was worthwhile. 

On that initial meeting, Harvey declined the opportunity to make a gift deciding (perhaps wisely) to see how long I lasted and what kind of leader I would turn out to be. But I continued to reach out to him from time to time and update him on our progress.  After a year or so, Harvey became a donor again and in an odd turn of events, he and I became friends. Harvey’s wife was in the late stage of a terminal illness and he had been told that he needed to extend his social network so that he would have friends and support when she passed. I offered to be part of that circle and we agreed to have lunch every month at the only restaurant that Harvey liked, the Rochester landmark known as Char Broil (it’s a diner). 

No matter how early I arrived for our appointments, Harvey was there already ensconced in a booth, Wall Street Journal open on the table. Sometimes he didn’t wait for me to order and was already enjoying his meal. Harvey always had buttermilk pancakes with blueberries unless it was Friday in which case he had the fried fish special. I always had a Greek salad regardless of the day of the week. That fried fish looked good though. 

Our unspoken agreement was that on those occasions I could tell him what was going on with Hillel and with me, but no pitching, no solicitation of donations. These were purely social get togethers. We usually ended up arguing (good naturedly) about politics and social issues. It was an interesting experience for me. I haven’t had many Republican friends. He often said he respected me because I was a traditional liberal and not a progressive. I never really figured out what the distinction was but it was clear he meant it as a compliment.  

One thing that Harvey and I did have in common was that we had both come to Jewish life later in adulthood: me in my 30s and he in his 50s. One day I asked him to share his journey with me. He told me that though a committed atheist and secularist, he had been persuaded to take a trip to Israel. There in his hotel he had a chance encounter with a rabbi and he ended up attending a Friday night Shabbat service and meal with him. The experience had such an effect on him that when he got home he decided to explore what this Judaism thing was all about. He began studying in a class with a local rabbi but spent much of the classes trying to lead the rabbi down a teleological rabbit hole. “How do we know there is a God? If God made the universe, who made God?” That sort of thing. Not invalid questions, but as we already know there are no answers to such questions. They are dead ends.  Then the rabbi said something to Harvey that according to him, changed everything for him. The rabbi said, “Harv, you are asking the wrong question. You are asking “How am I here?” You should be asking “Why am I here?”

In other words, Harvey recalled, “What was my purpose?” The next 30 years of his life became an effort to answer that question, and the Jewish tradition provided a context to begin his search for meaning and purpose. 

If you have ever worked for or been involved with the board of a nonprofit organization, chances are you have engaged in some kind of strategic planning process. I have been part of such an effort at least five times. The first step is usually to create a mission and/or a vision statement. A mission statement states the organization’s reason for being (Why are we here?) and a vision statement states how the world might look different as a result of its work. Hillel provides a good example of each. 

Our Mission: Enriching the lives of Jewish students so that they may enrich the Jewish people and the world. 
Our Vision: We envision a world where every student is inspired to make an enduring commitment to Jewish life, learning and Israel.

So many of us have engaged in this sort of deep existential questioning with regard to our work organizations but how many of us have asked the basic question of ourselves: Why am I here? How do I want the world to be different because I lived?

I have often written that identity is the story we tell ourselves about who we are. We rarely write this story down but it is an invisible script running in the background nonetheless. There is a second part of the identity question that is even harder to capture and that is: Who am I trying to become? How would I behave, what would I be if I were that person? 

So here is my challenge to you: Take a few minutes this week and write your mission statement. It should capture the best parts of who you are today and the aspirational aspects of where you want to go in your journey, and maybe how the world will be different because you lived. If you want, you can write a mission and a vision statement for yourself or combine them into one. Like the best of these statements it should be easy to understand and short enough to read on an elevator ride. To be clear, I am not calling on you to commit to a Steve Jobsian “dent in the universe.” Even Steve probably didn’t make a dent, truth be told. Rather, consider what are the actions and values that you feel are an essential part of a meaningful life for you? If possible, it should encompass your work (assuming you enjoy and find your work meaningful), your relationships, and your interests and also be aspirational: whom do you still want to become? It is also worth pointing out that you are never too old to ask these questions. My friend is still pondering the questions and working on the answers at age 84. 

I’d love to see what you come up with if you want to share and you can see mine here, but maybe wait to look at it until after you write your first draft so you are not influenced unduly. 

Of course, it goes without saying that having a mission statement does not ensure that you will live your best life, achieve your potential, or fulfill your purpose. Still one of the pre-requisites of “advancing confidently in the direction of your dreams” is to actually have a dream. 

What’s yours? Why are you here? What will be different because you were? 

Supply Chain, Cyber-attacks, and Slide Rules! Oh my!

Last week I decided to make some bagels to enjoy as part of a quintessential weekend breakfast. You know, bagels, lox, onion, tomato, the New York Times and, of course, cream cheese. I got the dough started on Thursday so that it could enjoy a nice slow, relaxing, cold fermentation in the fridge and I walked over to our nearby grocery to pick up the other items. What I found there surprised and terrified me. 

There was smoked salmon aplenty (crazy expensive as always but no matter). Sweet Vidalia Onions from Georgia? Yes, indeed. Tomatoes? Well, not too bad for grocery store produce at this time of year. They were reddish, in any case.  When I got the to the dairy section, however, mine eyes beheld a disturbing sight. 

There was every kind of yogurt you could want, with fat percentages that went from zero to fifty in 6 seconds and representing the nations of the world from Greece to Iceland, also heaps of cottage cheese, sliced Swiss, cheddar, and 32-ounce blocks of Velveeta in all its golden glory. But where the cream cheese should have been were just empty shelves. 

That’s right. No plain. No whipped. No chives. No veggie. No…nothing! Ok, to be honest, there were a few of sad packages of strawberry flavored cream cheese, but seriously? People buy this? No. No! Just No!!!

An anomaly, I thought. Someone forgot to place an order (heads will roll), or perhaps labor shortages on the loading dock were to blame. (I imagined huge cartons of Philly moldering out back waiting for some diligent worker to bring them inside.)  

Luckily, we have a (Rochester, N.Y.-based) Wegmans just 15 minutes up I-270. Still plenty of time to score 250 grams before Shabbes! Friday morning found me speeding up the Eisenhower Highway to the Wegmans in Germantown, Md. only to find… more empty shelves! Not a scrap of Philadelphia regular, low-fat, plain, or whipped! A single schmear of Temp Tee? Fahgetaboutit! It turns out the shortage is real and some are reacting with violence. Do I condone this behavior? Absolutely not! And yet, I have some empathy for Florida man’s sense of frustration.

To be fair, I didn’t walk away empty handed. An enterprising buyer at Wegmans must have obtained some bulk cream cheese somewhere, or perhaps they made it themselves and they were selling it in small plastic tubs with their own custom labels hastily slapped on each one. Because capitalism. 

Still I was shaken, if this could happen with cream cheese, what is safe? Even the cyber-attack on the pipeline last year and the ensuing gasoline panic didn’t rattle me like this did. I have a bicycle but what if I had had to eat my bagels with only butter?

The bigger question, of course, is: what happened that we took it for granted that we can have every single thing that we want whenever we want it? We used to have to wait for The Wizard of Oz to come on TV once a year. I only saw the movie once a year on a black and white TV until I was 26 and MGM re-released the movie in theaters. That’s when I first saw the psychedelic switch to Technicolor when Dorothy opens the door in Oz. It was a personal “not in Kansas anymore” moment. 

Likewise, bagels were something you had when you went to New York. (Yes, you could get pizza outside New York but you regretted it when you did.) Strawberries were spring, and peaches and fresh corn, only summer. Just a few generations ago, if you wanted to eat a chicken, you had to kill one with your own bare hands. At least you didn’t have to wait 45 minutes at the drive-through. 

Apparently, the cream cheese shortage is due, in part, to a cyber-attack. But that is also an indication of how, er, whipped we have become. You can’t make cream cheese because the computer went down? Do they not still train engineers to use slide rules just in case?

So yeah, we had cream cheese on our bagels, albeit a generic product. I couldn’t tell the difference truth be told. Besides, homemade bagels are so good they taste great unadorned. But it made me wonder, if push came to shove, what could I live without and still be happy. Cream cheese? Yes, for sure. Bagels? Maybe. Coffee? Please don’t make me answer that. 

I also wonder if it isn’t good for us to understand occasionally that we can’t have whatever we want whenever we want it. I have no desire to wait in line for bread as in Soviet era Russia, mind you. But after the last two years, I no longer take for granted that I will always be able to find my preferred brand of flour, or yeast, or gasoline, or cream cheese that doesn’t have strawberry in it. Perhaps among its other revelations, Covid has taught us that we are allowed to take nothing, absolutely nothing, as granted --that we are reminded to, if I may paraphrase the late, great Warren Zevon in his last interview with David Letterman, to enjoy every bagel. “With a schmear,” he might have added, “if you can get it.”