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abstract ideas, the theoretical sciences and, often, music as well. I would always smile in response, suggesting that such diagnoses were probably best left to the professionals. I couldn’t pretend, however, that emotional engagement with new acquaintances, even with people I knew and liked but were not close friends, was something that came naturally. And it is also true that from my first experience of the world of numbers as a child on the kibbutz, and as I tackled ever more elaborate pieces on the piano, I did become aware of what might be called the upside of “a touch of Aspergers” – if that, indeed, is what it is. I was conscious of the ease with which my brain translated the complexities into pictures in my mind. And the joy, at times, with which it allowed me to play around with, and develop, what I saw.

By the summer of 1967, I had experienced that feeling again, in my first real encounter with theoretical physics at Hebrew University. After the Six-Day War, I began seriously contemplating a future as a research scientist, or perhaps eventually a professor of physics. Two months after the war, I enrolled in a summer program at the Weizmann Institute, Israel’s preeminent postgraduate research facility. Surrounded by some of the country’s, even the world’s, leading scientists, and by post-doctoral students determined to follow in their footsteps, was intellectually enthralling. But it turned out to have another effect on me as well. As I thought more and more about the prospect of joining their fraternity once I’d completed my undergraduate degree, I also heard them describe the way in which pure science sometimes got submerged in simple routine, or, more discouragingly, in the politics and positioning and backbiting of the academic world.

I think what finally changed my mind, however, was a feeling, nurtured on the kibbutz but solidified by that many nights I’d spent leading sayeret operations across our borders, that I would find my true purpose in life trying to make some special contribution to the future course of Israel. I did not for a moment contemplate politics at that point. Instead, I thought of going back into the military. I realized that in order to make a significant mark, if indeed I could, would require me to serve in the regular army, not just an extraordinary unit like Sayeret Matkal. But I did hope that, at some stage, I’d be given the opportunity to finish my time in the sayeret as its commander, carrying on Avraham’s vision and, ideally, building and expanding on it as well. At least if that part proved possible, I felt that, by comparison, a career in academia would be somehow blinkered, and surely less fulfilling personally. My sayeret experience had also taught me something else as well: that protecting Israel’s security was not just a matter of muscle, or firepower, indispensible though they

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