People who make a difference do not die alone. Something dies in everyone who was affected by them. Amos made a great deal of difference, and when he died, life was dimmed and diminished for many of us.
There is a large Amos-shaped gap in the mosaic, and it will not be filled. It cannot be filled because Amos shaped his own place in the world; he shaped his life and even his dying. And in shaping his life and his world, he changed the world and the lives of many around him. Amos was the freest person I have known, and he was able to be free because he was also one of the most disciplined.
Some of you may have tried to make Amos do something he did not want to do. I don't think that there are many with successes to recount. Unlike many of us, Amos could not be coerced or embarrassed into chores or empty rituals. In that sense he was free, and the object of envy for many of us. But the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does and the ability to adapt creatively to the inevitable. I will l say more about the joy later. The supreme test of Amos's ability to accept what cannot be changed came in the last few months. Amos loved living. Death at a cruelly young age was imposed on him, before his children's lives had fully taken shape, before his work was done. But he managed to die as he had lived—free. He died as he intended. He wanted to work to the last, and he did. He wanted to keep his privacy, and he did. He wanted to help his family through their ordeal, and he did. He wanted to hear the voices of his friends one last time, and he found a way to do that through the letters that he read with pleasure, sadness, and pride, to the end.
There are many forms of courage, and Amos had them all. The indomitable serenity of his last few months is one. The civic courage of adopting principled and unpopular positions is another, and he had that too. And then there is the heroic, almost reckless courage, and he had that too. My first memory of Amos goes back to 1957 when someone pointed out to me a thin and handsome lieutenant , wearing the red beret of the paratroopers, who had just taken the competitive entrance exam to the undergraduate program in psychology at Hebrew University.
The handsome lieutenant looked very pale, I remember. He had been wounded. The paratrooper unit to which he belonged had been performing an exercise with live fire in front of the general staff of the Israel Defense Forces and all the military attaches. Amos was a platoon commander. He sent one of his soldiers carrying a long metal tube loaded with an explosive charge, which was to be slid under the barbed wire of the position they were attacking and was to be detonated to create an opening for the attacking troops. The soldier moved forward, placed the explosive charge, and lit the fuse. And then he froze, standing upright in the grip of some unaccountable attack of panic. The fuse was short and the soldier was certainly about to be killed. Amos leapt from behind the rock he was using for cover, ran to the soldier, and managed to jump at him and bring him down just before the charge exploded. This was how he was wounded. Those who have been soldiers will recognize this act as one of almost unbelievable presence of mind and bravery. I t was awarded the highest citation available in the Israeli Army.
Amos almost never mentioned this incident, but some years ago, in the context of one of our frequent conversations about the importance of memory in our lives, he mentioned it and said that it had greatly affected him. We can probably appreciate what it means for a 20-year-old to have passed a supreme test, to have done the impossible. We can understand how one could draw strength from such an event, especially if—as was the case for Amos—achieving the almost impossible was not a once-off thing. Amos achieved the almost impossible many times, in different contexts.
What kept us at it was a phrase that Amos often used: "Let's do it right." There was never any hurry or any thought of compromising quality for speed. We could do it because Amos said the work was important, and you could trust him when he said that. We could also do it because the process was so intensely enjoyable.
But even that is not all. To understand Amos's genius—not a word I use lightly—you have to consider a phrase that he was using increasingly often in the last few years: "Let us take what the terrain gives." In his growing wisdom, Amos believed that psychology is almost impossible because there is just not al l that much we can say that is both important and demonstrably true. "Let us take what the terrain gives" meant not overreaching, not believing that setting a problem implies it can be solved.
Fun was also part of Amos's genius. Solving problems was a lifelong source of intense joy for him, and the fact that he was richly rewarded for his problem solving never undermined that joy. Much of the joy was social. Almost all of Amos's work was collaborative. He enjoyed working with colleagues and students; he was supremely good at it ; and his joy was infectious. The 12 or 13 years in which most of our work was joint were years of interpersonal and intellectual bliss. Everything was interesting, almost everything was funny, and there was the recurrent joy of seeing an idea take shape. So many times in those years we shared the magical experience of one of us saying something that the other would understand more deeply than the speaker had done.
Contrary to the old laws of information theory, it was common for us to find that more information was received than had been sent. I have almost never had that experience with anyone else. If you have not had it, you don' t know how marvelous collaboration can be.
Daniel Kahneman. Eulogy for Amos Tversky read at his memorial service (June 5, 1996)
