A lot of things that most human beings would never think to do, to Amos simply made sense. For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.”
What all those who came to know Amos eventually realized was that the man had a preternatural gift for doing only precisely what he wanted to do. Varda Liberman recalled visiting him one day and seeing a table with a week’s worth of mail on it. There were tidy little stacks, one for each day, each filled with requests and entreaties and demands upon Amos’s time: job offers, offers of honorary degrees, requests for interviews and lectures, requests for help with some abstruse problem, bills. When the new mail came in Amos opened anything that interested him and left the rest in its daily pile. Each day the new mail arrived and shoved the old mail down the table. When a pile reached the end of the table Amos pushed it, unopened, off the edge into a waiting garbage can. “The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that,” recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. “And he would say, ‘No. You don’t.’ And I thought: lucky man!”
There was this beautiful simplicity to Amos: His likes and dislikes could be inferred directly and accurately and at all times from his actions. Amos’s three children have vivid memories of watching their parents drive off to see some movie picked by their mother, only to have their father turn up back at their couch twenty minutes later. Amos would have decided, in the first five minutes, whether the movie was worth seeing—and if it wasn’t he’d just come home and watch Hill Street Blues (his favorite TV drama) or Saturday Night Live (he never missed it) or an NBA game (he was obsessed with basketball). He’d then go back and fetch his wife after her movie ended. “They’ve already taken my money,” he’d explain. “Should I give them my time, too?” If by some freak accident he found himself at a gathering of his fellow human beings that held no appeal for him, he’d become invisible. “He’d walk into a room and decide he didn’t want anything to do with it and he would fade into the background and just vanish,” says Dona. “It was like a superpower. And it was absolutely an abnegation of social responsibility. He didn’t accept social responsibility—and so graciously, so elegantly, didn’t accept it.”
Occasionally Amos offended someone—of course he did. His darting pale blue eyes were enough to unsettle people who didn’t know him. Their constant motion gave them the impression he wasn’t listening to them, when the problem, often, was that he had listened too well. “For him the main thing is the people who don’t know the difference between knowing and not knowing,” says Avishai Margalit. “If he thought you were a bore and there was nothing there, he could cut you like nothing.” Those who knew him best learned how to rationalize whatever he had said or done.
It never occurred to him that anyone with whom he wanted to spend time wouldn’t want to spend time with him. “He expected first of all to charm you,” said Samuel Sattath. “Which was odd for such a smart person.” “He sort of invited people to love him,” said Yeshu Kolodny. “When you were on the good side of Amos he was very easy to love. Extremely easy. There was a competition around him. People competed for Amos.” It was a very common thing for Amos’s friends to ask themselves: I know why I like him, but why does he like me?
* * *
Amnon Rapoport did not lack for admirers. He’d been famously brave in battle. Israeli women, taking in for the first time his blond hair and tanned skin and chiseled features, often decided he was the best-looking man they’d ever laid eyes on. One day he’d earn his PhD in mathematical psychology and become a highly regarded professor, with his pick of the world’s universities. And yet he, too, when he sensed that Amos liked him, wondered why. “I know that what attracted me to Amos was how clever he was,” said Amnon. “I don’t know what attracted him to me. I was supposed to be very handsome, maybe that.” Whatever its source, the attraction was strong. From the moment they met, Amnon and Amos were inseparable. They sat side by side in the same classes; they lived in the same apartments; they spent summers hiking the country together. They were famously a pair. “I think some people thought we were homosexual or something,” said Amnon.
Amnon also had the best seat in the house when Amos decided what he was going to do with his life. Hebrew University in the late 1950s required students to pick two fields of concentration. Amos had chosen philosophy and psychology. But Amos approached intellectual life strategically, as if it were an oil field to be drilled, and after two years of sitting through philosophy classes he announced that philosophy was a dry well. “I remember his words,” recalled Amnon. “He said, ‘There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can’t have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.’” The mind-body problem was a good example. How are our various mental events—what you believe, what you think—related to our physical states? What is the relationship between our bodies and our minds? The question was at least as old as Descartes, but there was still no answer in sight—at least not in philosophy. The trouble with philosophy, Amos thought, was that it didn’t play by the rules of science. The philosopher tested his theories of human nature on a sample size of one—himself. Psychology at least pretended to be a science. It kept at least one hand at all times on hard data. A psychologist might test whatever theory he devised on a representative sample of humanity. His theories might be tested by others, and his findings reproduced, or falsified. If a psychologist stumbled upon a truth he might make it stick.
To Amos’s closest Israeli friends, there was never anything mysterious about his interest in psychology. Questions of why people behaved as they behaved, and thought as they thought, were thick in the air they breathed. “You never discussed art,” recalls Avishai Margalit. “You discussed people. It was a constant thing, a constant puzzle: What makes others tick? It comes from the shtetl. Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won’t repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.” Still, to many, the presence of a mind as clear as Amos’s in a field as murky as psychology remained a mystery. How had this relentlessly optimistic person, with his clear and logical mind and zero tolerance for bullshit, wound up in a field cluttered with unhappy souls and mysticism?