Samuel Iwry's son

SAMUEL IWRY'S SON is a financial official in Washington:

The Scholar Of Savings

(Dow Jones) Interpreting the Bible and retirement policy typically don't mix.

Unless you are J. Mark Iwry. The son of a Dead Sea Scroll scholar and a descendant of mystical 17th-century rabbi Baal Shem Tov, he also is a uniquely powerful Washington wonk, almost single-handedly guiding the nation's approach to retirement accounts and policy.

Iwry's job, as the Treasury Department's senior benefits official, is to figure out what the government can and can't do to boost retirement savings. He is currently promoting "auto-IRAs," the top retirement item in the Obama administration's budget, which will be introduced to Congress within a few weeks.

Overhauling retirement-plan policies involves interpreting arcane and often ambiguous provisions in the U.S. tax code, then getting employers and lawmakers to go along with proposed changes.

"He's sort of like a biblical scholar," says Norman Stein, professor of law at Drexel University. "He's interested in trying to deal with the technical and policy together, to get the technical to serve the policy."

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Iwry—who lives near Washington with his wife, Daryl Lander, a lawyer in solo practice, and his college-bound son—may have a tolerance for complexity in his DNA.

His father, Samuel Iwry, was a Bible scholar in Poland who joined the resistance during World War II, and made his way to Shanghai, where he negotiated with the British to allow Jewish families to emigrate from Asia to Palestine. He married the woman who nursed him back to health after he was imprisoned by the Japanese, and the couple moved to the U.S., where the senior Iwry became a professor at Johns Hopkins University and worked to decode the Dead Sea Scrolls.

For someone who chooses his words as if he is giving a deposition, the younger Iwry has the unlikely distinction, along with humorist Dave Barry, of being among the most quoted in the recently published "As Certain as Death: Quotations About Taxes," by Jeffery L. Yablon, a tax partner in the Washington office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.

In one, Iwry compares the tax code to the Bible: "Of only one other book can it be said . . . that great minds have devoted countless hours to the scrutiny and learned exegesis of every passage; that differing interpretations of the text have given rise to some of humanity's most epic struggles; and that, while millions mine it for valuable insights and inspiration, those who claim to live by the book and follow its precepts probably far outnumber those who actually do so."