708
SERGIU HART
By the way, it’s not a Jewish view that G-d is omnipotent. But that’s not the
point; the point is that the question is simply nonsense.
Altogether, the Jewish tradition is not very strong on theology, on what it is
that G-d can or cannot do. But there is a very strong tradition of human free will
in Judaism. There is definitely one thing that G-d cannot do, namely, influence a
person’s free will, his decision-making capacity. So there is a lack of omnipotence
at least in that aspect of the Jewish tradition.
H: Rational people can very well exist in this religious world. You have recon-
ciled that very nicely. That was very interesting.
A: I haven’t reconciled. I tried not to reconcile, but to say, these are different
things.
H: Reconciled in the sense that those things can coexist.
Let’s move now to your personal biography.
A: I was born in 1930 in Frankfurt, Germany, to an orthodox Jewish family. My
father was a wholesale textile merchant, rather well to do. We got away in 1938.
Actually we had planned to leave already when Hitler came to power in 1933, but
for one reason or another the emigration was cancelled and people convinced my
parents that it wasn’t so bad; it will be okay, this thing will blow over. The German
people will not allow such a madman to take over, etc., etc. A well-known story.
But it illustrates that when one is in the middle of things it is very, very difficult to
see the future. Things seem clear in hindsight, but in the middle of the crisis they
are very murky.
H: Especially when it is a slow-moving process, rather than a dramatic change:
every time it is just a little more and you say, that’s not much, but when you look
at the integral of all this, suddenly it is a big change.
A: That is one thing. But even more basically, it is just difficult to see. Let
me jump forward from 1933 to 1967. I was in Israel and there was the crisis
preceding the Six-Day War. In hindsight it was “clear” that Israel would come
out on top of that conflict. But at the time it wasn’t at all clear, not at all. I
vividly remember the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War, the crisis in which
Nasser closed the Tiran Straits and massed troops on Israel’s border; it wasn’t
at all clear that Israel would survive. Not only to me, but to anybody in the
general population. Maybe our generals were confident, but I don’t think so,
because our government certainly was not confident. Prime Minister Eshkol was
very worried. He made a broadcast in which he stuttered and his concern was
very evident, very real. Nobody knew what was going to happen and people
were very worried, and I, too, was very worried. I had a wife and three children
and we all had American papers. So I said to myself, Johnny, don’t make the
mistake your father made by staying in Germany. Pick yourself up, get on a plane
and leave, and save your skin and that of your family; because there is a very
good chance that Israel will be destroyed and the inhabitants of Israel will be
wiped out totally, killed, in the next two or three weeks. Pick yourself up and
GO.
INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT AUMANN
709
I made a conscious decision not to do that. I said, I am staying. Herb Scarf
was here during the crisis. When he left, about two weeks before the war, we said
good-bye, and it was clear to both of us that we might never see each other again.
I am saying all this to illustrate that it is very difficult to judge a situation from
the middle of it. When you’re swimming in a big lake, it’s difficult to see the shore,
because you are low, you are inside it. One should not blame the German Jews or
the European Jews for not leaving Europe in the thirties, because it was difficult
to assess the situation.
Anyway, that was our story. We did get away in time, in 1938. We left Germany,
and made our way to the United States; we got an immigration visa with some
difficulty. In this passage, my parents lost all their money. They had to work
extremely hard in the United States to make ends meet, but nevertheless they
gave their two children, my brother and myself, a good Jewish and a good secular
education. I went to Jewish parochial schools for my elementary education and
also for high school. It is called a yeshiva high school, and combines Talmudic
and other Jewish studies with secular studies. I have already mentioned my math
teacher in high school, Joe Gansler. I also had excellent Talmud and Jewish studies
teachers.
When the State of Israel was created in 1948, I made a determination eventually
to come to Israel, but that didn’t actually happen until 1956. In 1954 I met an
Israeli girl, Esther Schlesinger, who was visiting the United States. We fell in
love, got engaged, and got married. We had five children; the oldest, Shlomo, was
killed in Lebanon in the 1982 Peace for Galilee operation. My other children are
all happily married. Shlomo’s widow also remarried and she is like a daughter
to us. Shlomo had two children before he was killed (actually the second one
was born after he was killed). Altogether I now have seventeen grandchildren and
one great-grandchild. We have a very good family relationship, do a lot of things
together. One of the things we like best is skiing. Every year I go with a different
part of the family. Once in four or five years, all thirty of us go together.
H: I can attest from my personal knowledge that the Aumann family is really an
outstanding, warm, unusually close-knit family. It is really great to be with them.
F
IGURE
4. Bob Aumann with fianc´ee Esther Schlesinger, Israel, January 1955.