How Cancer Helped Me Discover My Purpose

It was after midnight when Rabbi Aaron Margalit sat alone in his study. Suddenly, the fax machine hummed to life and spit out a document that would change his world. Or, as he later said, it brought him to the very edge of death. In tightly spaced, slightly smudged Latin letters, it spelled out a grim diagnosis: Aaron Margalit had an aggressive form of cancer, located dangerously close to the brain.

His world shattered. The future seemed to disappear. His large home suddenly felt unnecessary and empty. Reality and imagination swirled together in a fog of fear and grief.

He broke down and cried but only for about eight minutes.

Rabbi Margalit has always been practical. Even as his world collapsed, he began to plan: how to write a will, how to prepare his family, and also, how to fight back. Giving up was not an option. He would not sit and wait for death. He had a decision to make.

And so, just hours after hearing the terrifying news, he made a plan. Alongside his physical and legal preparations, he made a spiritual decision that would guide him for the rest of his life.

“My decision was simple and clear,” he recalls. “No matter what happens, I’m here to fulfill Hashem’s will. I just needed to understand what that was.”

He turned to Hashem directly. “Father,” he cried, “please help me understand what You want from me. I’m not angry. I’m not fighting Your will. I only want to know my mission. Just help me understand what I’m supposed to do.”

For over an hour, Rabbi Margalit held on tightly to his desk and cried out quietly to Hashem. “Father! Dear Father! Please, help me see what You want from me, and I will do it.”

And then it happened. A moment of clarity, like a light turning on inside. Rabbi Margalit felt that Hashem had opened his eyes. He heard, not with his ears but in his heart, a message.

“Aaron,” it said, “you’ve spent your life helping others, trying to bring strength and joy to people in need but from the comfort of your office. Now, I am sending you to the darkest places, to the hidden corners of My world, where My children lie in pain. I am sending you to the basements of the hospitals, where chemotherapy drips into tired veins, and where the suffering cry out in silence. That is where I need you now. Can you go there, even while you yourself are attached to tubes and undergoing the same treatments?”

Rabbi Margalit understood. He would be going into the heart of suffering not just as a patient, but as an emissary. His illness wasn’t a punishment, it was his uniform.

“You need this illness to enter those places,” he felt Hashem saying. “It is your badge, your way in. Go lift their spirits. Go talk to them about faith, about trust in Hashem, about the purpose of pain. Help them forget their suffering, even for a few minutes. Bring them light.”

From that moment, Rabbi Margalit said, “I felt like an ambassador of the King. My illness was my entry pass.”

He began to act like a true emissary. In the day treatment unit, where chemotherapy was given, he would come in the morning and stay for hours. The process was long, blood tests, waiting for results, ordering medications, and finally receiving the infusion bags. He would be hooked up to six bags at once, hanging from two metal poles.

But instead of lying in bed, he would walk around with the poles, going from patient to patient. He made it his mission to speak to everyone. Some were crying, others were weak or vomiting. Still, he approached each one, offering words of encouragement, a smile, or just a gentle presence.

He says, “I didn’t act like a rabbi. I acted like a child if I had to. I did silly things, playful things, anything to bring joy or make someone laugh. I couldn’t believe myself sometimes, but I knew I had a mission. No one could ignore me.”

Some of the patients became his friends. Others he cried with. Some were too sick to speak. But all of them felt his warmth and his strength.

“I kept reminding them that this isn’t meaningless. Hashem doesn’t do random. Every moment has a purpose. Every challenge comes with a mission. Even pain can be a pathway to something higher.”

He battled the illness, recovered, and then became sick again. And recovered again. But throughout it all, he never stopped being an ambassador.

Today, Rabbi Aaron Margalit shares his story with people around the world. He gives lectures. He meets with children facing life-threatening illness. He still visits hospital basements. And he tells everyone the same message: we are all ambassadors. Each one of us. Not just him.

“You don’t need to go through cancer to be an emissary,” he says. “Hashem gives each of us a role. We just need to ask, to listen, and to carry it out with love.”

From the book Ethaleich, courtesy of the Dirshu website