I come here once a year to write personally. Not as the Founder and Director of the Lemonade Fund, but as my younger self who went to my yearly routine mammogram in the summer of 2010 only to learn that I likely had breast cancer. The diagnosis was confirmed two days later, on July 20, 2010 (9 Av 5770) That was the day when my life turned upside down.
It’s not easy to think back on that time. It would be easier to let these memories fade away. Thank God, I recovered and am healthy (and as of this year, a grandmother!) I’ve been fortunate to have 15 good years and merit many blessings for which I will always be grateful.
So why revisit that dark place each year? I go there, together with you, for the sake of the people who are newly diagnosed. Let me explain.
Anyone who has had cancer remembers the feelings of utter loneliness and desolation that come with the diagnosis. Cancer is frightening. But even more than that, it is isolating. Even with all of the communal and family support in the world (if one is lucky enough to have it,) the only one who actually is ill is the patient. The surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, etc., happen to just one body only. The patient’s. Treatments are often deforming, debilitating and life-changing. They’re hopefully curative, but the journey is long and there are no guarantees. And it is a solo journey.
I was diagnosed with cancer on the 9th of Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. A day commemorating historical tragedies suddenly seemed to mirror my own. There is a Jewish tradition to hope that this day, the 9th of Av, will one day be transformed into the happiest day of the year. Never a believer in coincidence, I embraced that tradition in my heart, and fast tracked the concept of turning destruction into reconstruction, desolation into consolation by establishing the Lemonade Fund (Israel’s first and only emergency financial relief nonprofit for women with breast and now gynecological cancers.) We are celebrating our 14th anniversary this summer… Fourteen years of giving hope, in the form of financial assistance, to the most vulnerable Israeli cancer patients.
I am incredibly proud that as a community, as a country, we haven’t lost the ability to really SEE and SUPPORT each other, especially during these last two years challenged by war and suffering. Memory produces empathy; in war and in illness. We feel the pain of those who have lost loved ones during this war and we pray for the safe return of all of our hostages. And we deeply feel the pain of the woman in Metula, the Negev and in Tel Aviv who is alone with a new cancer diagnosis. We cannot make her less alone on her journey, but we can help her feel less lonely by showing her that we know how she feels, because we were there once, too.
And that is why I come back here once a year. To remember, to feel deeply and to connect. Thank you for coming back with me each year.