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Kids battling cancer teach much
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18

February 19 • 2015

I Contributing Writer

group that profoundly
impacts the lives of thou-
sands of kids around the
world began with an interaction with a
single child.
In the 1990s, as director of Camp
Simcha, a pediatric oncology summer
camp in New York, Rabbi Elimelech
Goldberg encountered a frightened
young boy fighting a chemotherapy
treatment. Impulsively, the rabbi told
the child about the first-degree black
belt he holds in the Korean art of Choi
Kwang Do, asking if he wanted to learn
some karate.
Goldberg then told him, "In the
martial arts, pain is a message that you
don't have to listen to. You can bring in
this amazing karate energy and blow
out the pain."
While the two did a simple Tai Chi
breathing technique together, the treat-
ment continued, after which the rabbi
said the young boy looked up at his
nurse and asked, 'Did you do it yet?'
"At that moment, Kids Kicking
Cancer was born:' Goldberg wrote in
his new book, A Perfect God Created

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an Imperfect World Perfectly: 30 Life
Lessons from Kids Kicking Cancer, (BH
Media, December 2014).
Known to thousands of children as
"Rabbi G:' Goldberg is founder and
international director of the nonprofit
organization that helps children bat-
tling cancer and other serious chal-
lenges manage the stress and pain of
their disease and treatments through
mind-body techniques found in mar-
tial arts.
In 1999, Goldberg left a longtime
post at Young Israel of Southfield and
created Kids Kicking Cancer with a
mission "to ease the pain of very sick
children while empowering them to
heal physically, spiritually and emo-
tionally:'
At a Jan. 25 book signing at the orga-
nization's Southfield office, he launched
the 286-page hardcover publication,
which highlights lessons from some of
the kids involved with the group as well
as ways these lessons can be used to
help anyone reduce stress.
The book's intent, he says, is to share
the wisdom of these children and the
techniques that have changed their

Rabbi Goldberg

displays his new
book.

lives.
"When children facing health chal-
lenges are given purpose, they have
less pain," Goldberg wrote in the book.
"When adults learn how to take control
of their stress, using simple breathing
techniques and meditations, they live
longer and better:'

First Mentor

One chapter in the book describes
the journey to the creation of the
Kids Kicking Cancer by the child who
inspired the foreground for the organi-
zation: Goldberg's own daughter, Sara
Basya, who passed away from leukemia
in 1981, two weeks after her second
birthday.
He talks of his personal mission and
how his young daughter, whom he
refers to as "my first mentor; impacted
him to work with other children and
their families.
"There comes a point when it is
important to realize that we don't really
write the scripts in our lives:' he wrote.
"Our greatness is determined by how
we respond to that script"
Kids Kicking Cancer provides weekly
inpatient and outpatient classes for
children in the mind-body techniques
found in the martial arts.
Specially trained black belt martial
artists teach breathing, visualization
and relaxation techniques in addi-
tion to traditional martial arts moves