Repairing What is Broken

A few weeks ago, I pressed the button on my Honda Civic’s key fob to open the trunk. Nothing happened. Well, not nothing exactly. The trunk made a click sound, but where it normally pops up, it just stayed closed. I could manually open the trunk but the door was heavy instead of light as a feather as it usually is and once open it would often come crashing down on my head when I was loading the groceries. Ouch.

Upon closer inspection, I saw that one of the two torsion bars (no, I didn’t know what they were called until I searched YouTube) was broken clean off at one end. “Gotta get that fixed,” I thought and then promptly forgot about it until the next time I opened the trunk. Now more than two months have passed and I still haven’t attended to this. It is a small problem that doesn’t affect much except when you are trying to put things into or take things out of the trunk and then it is surprisingly irritating and inconvenient. But I’ve had other broken things to deal with that seemed more pressing.

Ever since Homo habilis started making stone tools about 2 million years ago, humans have been dealing with broken stuff and just as then, there are two approaches to the problem. One is the throw the thing out and get (or make) a new one and the other is to fix the broken one.

For millennia, the preferred way was to repair. Most of the time it was cheaper (in terms of labor expenditure or currency of exchange) to put a new edge on your stone axe than to acquire or to make a new one. Even in near ancient times, like my childhood, when stuff broke, you just got it fixed. Telephone stopped working? The phone company came over to your house and repaired it. TV on the blink? Probably a bad tube. Your dad (always your dad) removed the screws from the back, found the tube that wasn’t glowing and picked up a new one from the repair shop for a dollar or two and popped it in. Good as new! Which is to say fuzzy picture in black and white.

But during last 30 years, it has become more common when something breaks, to toss it in the trash, send it to the landfill, and buy a new one. Many modern things often can’t be repaired, were in fact designed to be unrepairable. Or even if they can be fixed, we tell ourselves, “it isn’t worth it.” By which we mean, we’d rather pay to have a new one with all the bells and whistles. With more expensive items like phones and cars we have even devised elaborate schemes like “leasing” and allowed ourselves to be convinced that they make good financial sense (they don’t) so that we can justify getting a new one every couple of years.

I prefer to get things fixed. Even today, it is still often cheaper to get something fixed, especially an expensive thing, than to get a new one. Plus, anytime you can fix something that is broken, you keep it out of the landfill for a while longer and a new one doesn’t need to be manufactured with all the environmental impacts of doing that. We keep most of our cars for 20 years or 200,000 miles. We bought our coffee maker in 2002. Even my laptop is seven years old and has had its battery, keyboard, and trackpad replaced. Still going strong, I might add. Not gonna lie – I upgrade my phone every year or two but then I pass along the old phone to my wife and her phone goes to one of the kids. Each phone has a long life and I have the latest technology. Best of both worlds – at least for me.

I have always envied folks who could fix things themselves. I have always thought of myself as someone who was not handy, and my culture milieu reinforces the stereotype that Jewish men are not handy. When I was working I justified “calling the men” (as my mom refers to it) to fix stuff because my time was “too valuable” to be crawling around under the sink.

But in the last two years I have been trying to claim a new identity: a person who can fix stuff. Three factors are at play.

First, though I still consider my time valuable, I seem to have more of it than I used to. Not having to commute to and work in an office from 8:00-18:00 everyday has been a huge boon, and trying to fix things is a luxury that comes with the extra time.

Second, I am home a lot! When I was in Rochester, if something broke, I just reported it at the rental office on my way out the door to work. By the time I came home, it had been magically fixed. A stove burner that wouldn’t heat up, a clogged bathtub drain, a loose kitchen tile, a closet door off its track all put right by guys (they were always guys) earning their livelihood while I earned mine. Now, I don’t have a livelihood and I am at home face to face with the broken stuff day after day until I do something about it.

Third, YouTube! Whatever in your life is broken, someone has made a video showing how to fix it and posted it online. Invariably, they make it look easy or at least doable by mortals.

So back in March of 2020 I took my first tentative steps by replacing the fan in the bathroom. This involved not only standing on a step stool but also (simple) electrical wiring. I neither fell off the stool nor electrocuted myself and was thus emboldened! What followed was a flurry of long delayed home repairs. Here is a small sample of my home handiwork:

• I replaced the bulb in the microwave oven

• I replaced the faucet gizmos in the kitchen sink that was dripping

• I replaced the hoses under the kitchen sink that were dripping

• I unclogged the trap under the bathroom sink

• I replaced the oven glass (after breaking it while making pizza)

• I changed a flat tire by the side of a dirt road in Kansas at sunset

• I installed a new HVAC system in our house (okay that is not true).

I did take down one of the venetian blinds and figured out how to fix it but when I called the company to get the plastic part I needed, they were closed for 3 months because of Covid and I never got around to calling them again. So, my record is not without blemish.

Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition teaches that our world has been broken from the beginning. God’s energy was too powerful for this poor universe to contain and God’s light ended up scattered throughout creation like shards from a delicate glass knocked to the kitchen floor. It is the job of the human being to collect the shards and assemble them back into something resembling a glass. We are not permitted to just collect the shards and throw them in the dustbin. It’s God’s light after all. The task is not finished until we have fixed everything that is shattered.

The thing about fixing stuff is that the odyssey is never-ending. Things are always breaking. No sooner do you fix one thing than another breaks. I understand why it is so tempting just to chuck the worn thing that is not working and to get a shiny new one. But keeping the old thing going often makes more sense for your life, your wallet, and, of course, the planet and, I have learned, if you can do the repair yourself, it can feel very empowering.

Russian bombs are falling in Ukraine, the stock market is in a tail spin, energy prices are soaring, and the political chasm in America seems to grow wider every day. I’d like to be helpful, to do my bit in fixing these things but, truthfully, I don’t know how to begin. Today, I’ll have to be satisfied with ordering a new torsion bar for the trunk of the Civic and attempting to install it with the help of a kind dude on YouTube who made a video.

Right now, it is the only part of this broken world that this dad/guy has the confidence to try to repair.

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?