When Rabbi Yossi Rodal Was Diagnosed With Cancer, He Decided Not to Let It Go to Waste

by Moshe New – chabad.org

At the 42nd International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries in New York City this week, Rabbi Yossi Rodal finds himself being stopped every few feet by his fellow emissaries. It’s not just because he lives in the distant Australian town of Newcastle, where he and his wife, Malki, direct Chabad-Lubavitch of the Hunter and Central Coast.

Classmates from yeshivah, colleagues he’s spoken to via WhatsApp over the past four months, rabbis who’ve been following his story from continents away: They all want to embrace him, to hear his voice.

Four months ago, that voice nearly vanished.

It started, as Rodal wryly notes, with “the mistake of going to the dentist.”

During a routine appointment last August in Newcastle—a coastal city two hours north of Sydney, where he and Malki have served as Chabad emissaries for five years and live with their five sons—the dentist noticed an ulcer on his tongue. Get it checked out, the dentist urged him. Miracle No. 1, Rodal recalls, is that the dentist caught it. Miracle No. 2? He actually listened.

With Malki recovering from a severe epidural headache following the birth of their fifth son just weeks earlier, and their Chabad center’s preschool program restarting with children running through the building, the biopsy had to wait. When Rodal finally went in two weeks later, he was certain it was nothing. Then the doctor asked him to come in to discuss the results.

Sitting in the doctor’s office, he heard the word that stops time: cancer. Tongue cancer. He called Malki immediately.

“I didn’t know anything about cancer in general, let alone oral cancer,” he told Chabad.org. But he was about to get an education from two of the country’s leading specialists. In a twist that felt bashert, both happened to be Jewish and both happened to be in Newcastle.

One occasionally attended Chabad events. The other, Gary, had been the recipient of the Rodals’ challah deliveries and messages of invitation for five years. Until now, Gary hadn’t responded. Now, he would be one of the surgeons operating on the rabbi.

“Gary,” Rodal told him at their first consultation, “we didn’t have to do this to meet.”

This approach is typical of how Rodal had decided to take on this challenge—with energy and good spirits. He was going to use this as an opportunity to do good, to do more.

‘I Chose to Embrace It’

The treatment plan was aggressive because it had to be. For tongue cancer, this was considered on the larger end of the scale. Surgeons would remove a significant portion of his tongue, perform a tracheotomy, dissect lymph nodes from his neck and harvest tissue from his forearm for a graft. The surgery would require the rabbi shaving his beard, something he never imagined he would do as a Chassidic rabbi.

The timing made it more brutal; he would be released from hospital on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. With a tracheotomy. Unable to blow shofar. But that didn’t stop him from trying. For an “everything rabbi” in remote Australia, Rodal is used to doing everything. Leading the services, reading from the Torah, delivering the sermon, and helping congregants find their place in the prayers. When it comes to the High Holidays, that means also blowing the shofar, a skill many laymen might struggle with.

“I tried to blow shofar through my trach, and let me tell you, it doesn’t work,” he mentions with his characteristic humor.

There were unknowns that frightened him more than the cancer itself. How would the skin graft react? Would he ever sing again? For a Chabad emissary whose life revolves around leading services, teaching Torah, connecting with his community through words and melody, the prospect of silence was terrifying.

But something shifted in the indefatigable Rodal between the diagnosis and the surgery. Years of counseling congregants through their darkest moments—sitting with the sick, comforting the mourning, offering words of faith to those whose faith was faltering—had prepared him for this chapter in ways he didn’t expect.

Rabbi Mendy Schapiro, a nearby emissary at Chabad of the North Shore in Sydney, gave Rodal words that would become his mantra: “Look in the mirror and repeat what you told the last guy who asked you for advice. If you believe it, great. If you don’t … .”

Rodal looked in that mirror. He thought about what he would tell someone in his community facing this diagnosis. And he realized he believed every word of it.

“When this happened, I chose to embrace it and use it as an opportunity to connect with the community like never before,” he explains of that mindset shift. “Many shluchim deal with these issues for others, but we don’t know it ourselves. But now, I knew it myself.”

He drafted a message to his community: “I want to share some personal news with you, and whilst it is difficult news, it’s important to Malki and I that we include you, our community, in this next season of our lives. Two weeks ago, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with oral cancer. We are blessed to have caught it early and the doctors are confident that I will make a full recovery. However, the treatment entails a complicated and invasive surgery, and I am looking at a recovery of two to six months.”

But in the same message, it was important for him to share his perspective.

“In simple terms, we cannot understand the ways of G‑d,” he wrote. “Our finite minds cannot encompass the totality of life’s intricacies and complications as G‑d sees them. It is simply beyond our capacity to fathom how each event in our lives is a step toward the fulfillment of the Divine plan.

“I know that this is from G‑d, and I know that I will be even stronger coming out the other side. Now is my chance to practice what I preach. Literally.”

A Community Rises

Within hours of sharing the news, Schapiro and Rabbi Menachem Aron, who oversees rural and regional Australian emissaries from his base in Melbourne as program director of Chabad of RARA, took control. They launched a fundraiser with an initial goal of $25,000 to cover medical expenses, living costs and keep the Chabad center running while Rodal recovered.

Before anyone could blink, the campaign had raised more than $200,000. More than 1,000 people donated. Packages arrived for the children. Messages of support flooded in from around the world. The Melbourne community organized a Chassidic farbrengen gathering over Zoom. Sydney shluchim traveled to Newcastle before the surgery for an in-person farbrengen.

Ahead of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, two daughters of the Chabad emissaries in Perth came to Newcastle and stayed for over two weeks to help care for the children. Rabbi Josh and Abigail Wonder flew in from Melbourne to lead the High Holiday services, while a community member, Bert, blew the Shofar.

“It’s a difficult thing to hear another person give a speech to your people,” Rodal acknowledges. “But I’ll admit, it was amongst one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen, for me and for the community.”

Perhaps the most remarkable support came from unexpected places within his own community. There was the man Rodal had only seen three times in five years, not for lack of trying. After the diagnosis, he suddenly reached out. He had beaten cancer himself, he shared, and wanted Rodal to know it was possible.

Then there was the non-religious doctor who asked what he could do to help. Rodal’s characteristic Chabad rabbi’s answer surprised him: “It would mean a lot to meet up and put on tefillin. That would help me heal.” They went on a two-hour walk, discussing life, faith, mortality, and meaning. The doctor had to run to work at the end, but they made a date to actually put on tefillin together. The rabbi managed to turn a non-meeting into two.

One congregant decided to grow a beard in his rabbi’s stead. Four months have passed, and he’s kept it ever since. The community started a tehillim chat. Rodal’s family and friends organized a prayer group that went through the entire book of Psalms more than 50 times.

And then there was the self-proclaimed atheist.

He had wanted nothing to do with Chabad when the Rodals first arrived in Newcastle. Slowly, persistently, Rodal had built a bridge, and the “atheist” had become his good friend. When he came to visit after the surgery, he pulled out an old, battered tehillim from his time serving in three wars in the IDF.

“Use this for your war,” he told the rabbi, pressing the prayer book into his hands.

Sitting in the Pews

The surgery happened just before Rosh Hashanah. The family decided to stay in Newcastle throughout the recovery, as the community rallied around them with meals, childcare and tutors for their five boys—ages 11, 9, 6, 2 and four months—whom they homeschool.

For the first time in his years as a Chabad emissary, Rodal prayed the High Holiday services from the pews instead of leading from the bimah.

“This is the first time as the rabbi of this community that I sat next to community members, being in their place,” he says. “It was a learning experience. I went into research mode. I got to see which parts are interesting, which parts resonate and which parts I’d better skip next year.”

He had a special chair that allowed him to recline when the pain became too intense. Rodal spoke three times that day: once during davening, once at the meal and once at the park where they held shofar for 150 people who showed up. Each time he spoke was a challenge. He was a little self-conscious of how he sounded after the surgery that affected his ability to speak.

There was also the joy of sitting and praying together with his sons, something the pulpit rabbi seldom is able to do. He was able to guide them through the entire Shemoneh Esrei prayer together for the first time.

“I never had that perspective before,” he says. “I was able to think and concentrate on davening, be with my children, and it was amazing.”

But in recounting that Rosh Hashanah from the pews, Rodal’s voice lights up when he speaks of what he considers the real highlight of the holiday: He’d managed to organize a minyan 65 miles away, in the Central Coast region, for the first time ever. They had held prayer services. Shofar in the park. A big meal. People he’d been trying to gather for years suddenly showed up. Here was a rabbi dealing with something no one should have to face, yet Jews gathering in Central Coast remained for him the milestone.

One story says it all: A Russian-Jewish family whom Malki had met accidentally, afterwards discovering the wife came from “a tiny village in Russia called Lubavitch,” showed up for Rosh Hashanah services. Their 13-year-old son, an Olympic swimmer, received an aliya at the Torah for the first time, a bar mitzvah of sorts.

Bert, who had been blowing the Shofar, sat next to the young swimmer, guiding him through his first Jewish High Holiday experience. Afterward, Bert told the rabbi: “This was the most inspirational prayer I ever had, even though I barely said a word.”

That’s when Rodal understood: “You can’t let cancer go to waste.”

The Road to Recovery

The first days after surgery were the hardest. Family members took turns staying those initial weeks. But the last four days in the hospital, the community came—20 people cycling through, one woman from her printing shop bringing randomly selected passages from the Torah to tape on his walls.

When Rodal couldn’t speak, Malki sent updates. The community organized a mitzvah campaign in his merit. The Psalms chat continued. People around the world were saying his name in their tefillot [prayers].

The recovery has been long. There’s been therapy—physical, speech, occupational. Learning to use his tongue again. Managing pain. Regaining strength. Rodal hasn’t yet said the Hagomel blessing, the thanksgiving prayer recited after surviving a life-threatening situation, because he doesn’t feel fully healed. But he’s close.

Close enough that this week, he shared with the Psalm group that he was well enough for their prayers to be directed in merit of a speedy recovery for others. After more than 50 complete readings of Psalms on his behalf, after months of people around the world including his name in their prayers, Rodal felt he had reached a threshold. The acute crisis had passed. He was going to be OK.

“I’m hearing now that people are saying my strength is helping them,” he reflects. “This will help me with my shlichut moving forward.”

From the beginning of his recovery, he had set a goal: make it to the Kinus Hashluchim, the annual International Conference of Chabad Emissaries in New York, where he could go to the Ohel, the resting place of the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, to say thank you for the blessings. See family and friends, and draw inspiration from thousands of fellow emissaries to bring with him back to Newcastle.

“Our shlichut has been sort of on hold since the baby and the cancer,” he explains. “No Hebrew school, and I haven’t been giving classes or doing my regular visits. Before we get back into it, I thought we need some inspiration, and I worked hard to be able to come here for the Kinus.”

The decision to actually go was last-minute because he needed to be certain his body could handle the trip. When he landed in Florida on Wednesday evening to see family before heading to the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., for Thursday’s opening, it felt surreal. Walking around without much of his beard, which is slowly growing back, feels strange. But being here, among his fellow shluchim, feels like coming home.

His first stop in New York was to the Rebbe’s resting place at the Ohel, where on Wednesday evening he brought a long list of names of community members.

What’s he looking forward to most at the conference?

“Seeing my friends, my family. All the regular Kinus stuff,” he says with a smile, though he knows this Kinus will be anything but regular for him.

When Rodal returns to Newcastle on Monday, he plans to give his first Torah class in four months. His boys have been looking forward to having their beloved teacher back. It’s been four months since they’ve had a formal lesson with their father.

That first class will be a statement: we’re back. Not fully, not 100%, but back. The Chabad center is reopening. The rabbi who couldn’t speak can teach again. The shliach who sat in the pews will return to the bimah.

“This was an opportunity to show the community how a Jew, how a shliach of the Rebbe, deals with such a challenge,” Rodal says of his journey. “Judaism is the whole spectrum of life: the sad, the happy, that’s life.”

Monday’s shiur will mark a new chapter. But this week in Crown Heights is the bridge between what was and what will be.