Amnon Rapoport was just eighteen years old when he was identified by the Israeli army’s new selection system as leadership material. They’d made him a tank commander. “I didn’t even know there was a tank corps,” he said. One night in October 1956 he drove his tank into Jordan to avenge the murder of several Israeli civilians. On these raids you never knew what decisions you might have to make quickly. Shoot or hold fire? Kill or let live? Live or die? A few months earlier, an Israeli soldier Amnon’s age had been captured by the Syrians. He’d decided to kill himself before they could question him. When the Syrians sent his body back, the Israeli army found a note in his toenail: “I never betrayed.”
On that night in October 1956, Amnon’s first decision had been to stop firing: His job was to bombard the second floor of a Jordanian police building until Israeli paratroopers stormed the ground floor. He worried about killing his own men. After he’d stopped shelling he heard, over his tank’s radio, reports from the ground. “And all of a sudden, the reality hit me; this was not just an adventure with heroes and villains acting their role. People were dying.” The paratroopers were Israel’s elite fighting force. Their unit, in hand-to-hand combat, was suffering serious causalities, and yet their reports from the battle to Amnon’s ears inside the tank sounded calm, almost casual. “There was no panic,” he said, “indeed, no change of intonation and hardly any expression of emotion.” These Jews had become Spartans: How had that happened? He wondered how he would fare in hand-to-hand combat. He aspired to be a warrior, too.
Two weeks later he drove his tank into Egypt, in what turned out to be the start of a military invasion. In the fog of battle, he was strafed not just by Egyptian but also Israeli warplanes. His most vivid memory was of an Egyptian MiG-15 diving straight down on his tank while he—with his head above the turret to maintain a 360-degree view of the battlefield—shouted at his driver to zig and zag to avoid being hit. It felt like the MiG was on a special assignment to blow off his head. A few days later, desperate Egyptian soldiers in full retreat approached Amnon’s tank with their arms in the air. They begged for water and protection from the Bedouins who hunted them for their rifles and boots. The day before, he was murdering these people; now all he felt toward them was pity. He marveled again—“at how easy it is to shift from an efficient killing machine to compassionate human being, and how quick the switch may be.” How did that happen?
After the battles Amnon just wanted to get away from it all. “I was a little bit wild after two years in the tank,” he said. “I wanted to go as far away as possible. Flying out of the country was too expensive.” Israelis in the 1950s didn’t talk about combat stress or its discontents: They just dealt with it. He took a job in a copper mine in the desert just north of the Red Sea—said to be one of the legendary mines of King Solomon. His math skills were better than any of the other workers’, most of whom were prison labor, and so he was made the mine’s bookkeeper. Among the conveniences that King Solomon’s mine was unable to provide was a toilet, or toilet paper. “I went out to take—excuse me—to take a shit. I saw a note in the newspaper that I took to wipe my ass. It said they were opening a psychology department at Hebrew University.” He was twenty years old. What he knew of psychology was Freud and Jung—“there were not many textbooks in psychology in Hebrew”—but the subject interested him. He couldn’t say why. Nature had called, psychology had answered.
Entrance into Israel’s first psychology department, unlike entrance into most Hebrew University departments, was to be competitive. A few weeks after he’d read the ad in the newspaper, Amnon stood in line outside the monastery that served as Hebrew University, waiting to take a series of bizarre tests—including one designed by Danny Kahneman, who had written a page of prose in a language he had invented so that applicants might attempt to decipher its grammatical structure. The line of applicants ran down the block. There were only twenty or so spots in the new department, but hundreds of people wanted into it: An amazing number of young Israelis, in 1957, wanted to know what made people tick. The talent was also incredible: Of the twenty people admitted, nineteen went on to earn their doctorates, and the one who didn’t was a woman who, scoring one of the top marks on the admissions test, then had her career derailed by children. Israel without a psychology department was like Alabama without a football team.
In line beside Amnon stood a small, pale, baby-faced soldier. He looked about fifteen but he wore, almost absurdly, the high, rubber-soled boots and crisp uniform and red beret of the Israeli paratrooper. The new Spartan. Then he started to speak. His name was Amos Tversky. Amnon wouldn’t remember exactly what he had said but he’d remember, vividly, how he’d felt about it. “I was not as smart as he was. I understood it immediately.”
* * *
To his fellow Israelis, Amos Tversky somehow was, at once, the most extraordinary person they had ever met and the quintessential Israeli. His parents were among the pioneers who had fled Russian anti-Semitism in the early 1920s to build a Zionist nation. His mother, Genia Tversky, was a social force and political operator who became a member of the first Israeli Parliament, and the next four after that. She sacrificed her private life for public service and didn’t agonize greatly about the choice. She was often gone—she spent two years of Amos’s early childhood in Europe, helping the U.S. Army liberate the concentration camps and resettle the survivors. Upon her return she spent more time at the Knesset in Jerusalem than at home.
Amos had a sister, but she was thirteen years older, and he was raised, in effect, as an only child. The person who did most of that raising was his father, a veterinarian who spent much of his time treating livestock. (Israelis couldn’t afford pets.) Yosef Tversky, the son of a rabbi, despised religion and loved Russian literature, and found a great deal of amusement in what came out of the mouths of his fellow human beings. His father had turned away from an early career in medicine, Amos explained to friends, because “he thought animals had more real pain than people and complained a lot less.” Yosef Tversky was a serious man. At the same time, when he talked about his life and work, he brought his son to his knees with laughter about his experiences, and about the mysteries of existence. “This work is dedicated to my father, who taught me to wonder,” Amos would one day write at the opening of his PhD dissertation.
Amos was fond of saying that interesting things happened to people who could weave them into interesting stories. He, too, could tell a story, with startlingly original effect. He spoke with a slight lisp that reminded some of the way that Catalans spoke Spanish. He was so pale that his skin was almost translucent. Whether he was speaking or listening, his pale blue eyes darted back and forth, as if searching for an approaching thought.
Even as he spoke, he gave the impression of constant motion. He wasn’t conventionally athletic—he was always small—but he was loose-jointed and fast: twitchy and incredibly agile. He had an almost feral ability to run at great speed up and down mountains. One of his favorite tricks—he’d sometimes do this as he told a story—was to place himself on a high surface, whether a rock or a table or an army tank, and fall face-first toward the ground. His body perfectly horizontal to the earth, he’d fall until people shrieked and then he’d pull himself up at the last moment and somehow land on his feet. He loved the sensation of falling, and the view of the world from above.