Posted on May 28, 2015 - by Enoteca

“Bubbie’s Blessing” A Heartwarming Sermon on the Story of Enoteca

Nonna’s Kitchen, Bubbie’s Blessing

Rabbi Michelle S. Robinson

Delivered Shabbat morning, April 11, 2015 (22 Nisan 5775)

We come here this morning, our hearts heavy with memories. What do we do with those memories?

Jody Scaravella, the author of a unique new cookbook, asked that very question.  He had grown up in a close-knit Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn surrounded by a family so warm and loving that, until he was 50 years old, he chose to live on the same block on which he had grown up.  His sister lived across the street.  Evenings and weekends were filled with the smells and tastes and sounds of the generations gathering around the kitchen of his Nonna, his grandmother.

When all seemed to be humming along, tragedy struck.  He recalls, “I lost my grandfather and father, my grandmother and mother, and my sister in fairly quick succession.  I was feeling bereft, like the last man standing.”

The street, once so full of life and laughter, now became haunted with shadows.  He looked around the place where he had felt most at home in the world and couldn’t find home there anymore. Without those he loved, the street was just a street.

All those losses had left him with a little bit of an inheritance.  He decided he would use it to start a new life.  Thinking that after 50 years in the city, a nice house near the water would be just right for his second chapter, he asked a realtor to take him out to Staten Island.  By serendipity he found a house he fell in love with the moment he walked in.  The dining room had a little shelf wrapping all around the room, the perfect place to display his mother’s dishes.  Surrounding himself with mementos of his beloved family felt right. But in this new house, in this new place, there was much missing.

Until one day he was walking near the docks and he spotted a store-front for rent.  It felt to him, he said, “like a cozy little restaurant.”

He could display his mother’s plates on his wall, he realized, but it was what was on those plates that brought his family’s memory to life.  His big, close-knit Italian family gathered around Nonna’s table.  It was in the authentic hand-made pasta and the parmesan grated just so, in the sauces and the smiles, that their memories lived.  On that walk, an idea clicked into place.

Jody drafted an ad to place in the local Italian-language newspaper for a very particular kind of cook for his new restaurant.  He wasn’t sure if anyone would reply.  Some friends told him it was a crazy idea.

The ad invited grandmothers, Nonnas, to come to his restaurant.  The request was simple: cook whatever you are inspired to cook, your best recipe, your most authentic dishes that bring your family together around your table – a different Nonna offering a different meal every night.

The restaurant has become an astounding success.  People come by ferry from Manhattan and all over the world to eat what are living memories, not only for Jody Scaravella, but for so many the taste of their own beloved departed Nonna’s kitchens.  In the smells, the tastes, what was lost is re-experienced and, if even just for a few moments, lives again.

Jody named the restaurant Enoteca Maria, after his mother.  He says, “I realize now that I was unconsciously trying to fill gaps: to recreate the warmth… to reconnect with the embrace of the family I had lost.”

In many ways, this week we have all been in Nonna’s kitchen.  In our Bubbie’s matzah ball soup recipes and our mother’s fine china special for the Seder.  In our father’s kiddush.  In remembering which of the four children, the arbah banim siblings would have read.  How is it we always seemed to have the same roles every year?

At my Seders growing up, as the evening drew to a close, my father would take his palm and place it on the table just so, his other hand tapping his heart, and in his best thick Ashkenazish accent would bring his Zaide to life in the droning old-world stanzas of Adir B’mlucha.  This year, since my father is in Jerusalem, my sister and I re-enacted for our children their Zaide’s Zaide. It just wouldn’t be Pesach without him.

Pesach is great at that.  The Seders are great at giving us the ritual and the food to bring back the tastes and the smells, the sound and the feel of our departed beloved. But life is not so great at that.

Today is the last day of Passover.  Tonight, after the last chair is put away and the dishes are returned to storage, we go from hearing a beloved’s inflection in each word of the Haggadah, to the stark reality of all the conversations we will never get to share.  From opening the door for Elijah, to knowing they will never again walk through our door.  From the way the story of the Exodus was always told just so, to a story we’re not so sure we know the lines to anymore.  We can’t feel their touch.  Can’t see them smile.  Can’t hold their hand in our own.  We do not LIVE in Nonna’s kitchen.

Or do we?

The interesting thing about Yizkor today is that it reminds us that we do not have to feel their touch to be touched by them. We do not need to hold their hands to be their hands, making this world a better place in their memory.

Pesach’s foundational principle is kol hamarbeh l’saper, harei zeh meshubach.  We cannot get enough of telling the story of the Exodus on Passover.  And we cannot over-do telling the story of our loved ones throughout the year.  In telling their story, we learn their lessons.  In learning their lessons, we live their legacy.

John Tierney reported in the New York Times about a new research study.  “Nostalgia,” he wrote, “had been considered a disorder ever since the term was coined … longing to return home, nostos in Greek, and the accompanying pain, algos.”  To revisit the story of what we have lost had been understood as clinging to that which we can no longer have.

On the contrary, this study discovered.  It turns out that when we revisit memories of blessing, we discover the strength to create blessing anew.

A few days before Passover, I opened a card that had come to my office.  It came from a dear member of our community.

My eyes filled with tears as I read the story she shared.  Although she herself is now a grandmother, she began, “My beautiful grandparents and parents every year before Pesach would give tzeddakah.”  As I continued to read, it was clear that in this card she had not only enclosed a donation in their memory, but told their story in a way that enabled her to bring their deeds back into this world.

What is amazing is that according to the study, not only good memories can have this positive effect.  The study’s author, Dr. Sedikides, said, “Nostalgic stories [can] start badly,” but “you end up with a stronger feeling of belonging…”  Those stories make us “feel that [our lives have] roots and continuity. [They provide] a texture to…life and [give us] strength to move forward.”

We all have memories – some of them extraordinary, some of them painful.  But each of them, this study and Pesach itself remind us, are gems.

Our ancestors once left Egypt, but we have continued to tell the story.

Jody Scaravella moved away from the old neighborhood to a new life, but he kept telling the story from his mother’s dishes to his Nonna’s delicacies.  In telling that story, he invited an entire community in.

The Nonnas he invited in to cook for a night or two have become his extended family.  They have found community and connection and healing in each other.  One Nonna even moved away to New Jersey, but she still commutes one and a half hours each way to cook two nights a month.  In the remembering, they created and continue to create new memories.  Jody and the Nonnas recently published a book titled, “Nonna’s House: Cooking and Reminiscing with the Italian Grandmothers of Enoteca Maria.”

That is our charge today – marbeh l’saper.

How do we remember?  We come together, we tell their stories and we listen to where those stories lead us.  For Jody Scaravella, it was a little restaurant by the shore that he filled with new friendships and new joy. What will it be for you?

We do not have the voice or smile of our loved ones, but we do have their story.

As the authors Charles and Ann Morse once wrote, “It is into us that the lives of [our loved ones] have gone.  It is in us that their history becomes a future.”

May we tell their stories well so that they help us to create new stories that bring new life to our world.