As My Son’s Wedding Approaches, a Ramble Through My Mind

Last Saturday, Prince Charles officially became King Charles III. His coronation ceremony and celebration were watched by tens of millions of people in Britain and around the world. There’s something alluring and attractive about the pomp and ceremony of a tradition dating back a thousand years. It’s living history writ large.

This coming Saturday my son and daughter-in-law (to be) will be married by a rabbi under a chuppah in a tradition that long predates British coronations. I think of their wedding ceremony also as a type of coronation. In this case of a marriage and of a new family. When a crown is placed on a prince’s head he forever changes into a king. When the rabbi pronounces a couple to be husband and wife, they too are changed. It is a momentous and joyful event and deserves to be marked by tradition and celebration.   

And as the wedding approaches, I can think­­ of little else.

By a stroke of coincidence and, to me, a wonderful omen and symbol, my son’s middle name is the same as his bride’s last name. So they will share their last two names, i.e., their initials will be ANR and RNR after the bride adds Roberts to her name.

I’ll dispute what Shakespeare has Juliet say to Romeo: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Names are important. In ancient times, knowing someone’s name was viewed as possessing great power over the named. Hence when Moses is sent by God on his mission to free the Jewish people from Egypt, Moses asks God “What’s your name so I can tell the people who has sent me?” God is not about to give Moses that power and instead answers, “I am who I am.”  God’s name in the Torah/Old Testament is composed of four Hebrew letters, known as the Tetragrammaton, and is never supposed to be pronounced aloud.

As my daughter-in-law (to be) adds her considerable luster and grace to our family’s name, I’m thinking about how our last name of Roberts was changed by my grandfather, born Alfred Rottenberg. It was 1940, a time when there was a great deal of antisemitism in America. Alfred’s son William (my father) was then two years old, and I suppose Alfred’s primary motivation for the change was to prevent his children and grandchildren from being immediately labelled as Jewish. To ease their path in American life.

My great-grandfather Samuel Rottenberg wrote a beautiful letter to his son Alfred about the name change. Samuel was clearly saddened by it. He considered his name Rottenberg as a flag to be carried forward proudly, much like the name and the flag of a country, aware that actions taken under the name’s banner would accrue to the credit or shame of the family.

But despite his disappointment, Samuel accepted his son’s new name and ended the letter with a wish, really a blessing, that the new name Roberts would be one that Alfred would carry forward with honor. I give Samuel a great deal of credit for that wisdom.

I’ve often wondered if my life would have been very different had I been David Rottenberg rather than David Roberts. I think so. A different name is a bigger change than the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wings that sets in motion a cascading series of changes until the world with and without the flap’s slight breeze are vastly different.

When I was younger, I felt some faint regret at the name change as if I was hiding something. As if I was somehow masquerading, somehow disrespecting my heritage. But I’ve never once thought of myself as anything other than David Roberts. And I take comfort in my great grandfather Samuel’s blessing of the name Roberts, new in 1940, but now 83 years old and having been carried by four generations. My name is indeed my flag, and I try to be aware that what I do, good or bad, affects not only my reputation but that of my family, past, present, and future.

(Admittedly, Roberts is a fairly common name. I know of no infamously villainous Roberts, except the “Dread Pirate Roberts” from The Princess Bride who we’d all gladly accept as a relative!)

I am expected to give a toast at the wedding. I will offer the married couple no advice.  My wife and I have been married for 37 years, and so I have one singular experience of a happy marriage. My lack of varied experience makes me spectacularly unqualified to generalize or to give advice. If there’s a dependable, concrete formula for a happy marriage and happy family, I’m unaware of it.

So I consider misleading the most famous opening line in 19^th century literature, “All happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way,” Tolstoy’s beginning to Anna Karenina.

There is a theory that Tolstoy wrote the next 350,000 words to purposely prove that his famous first sentence was false. In the novel, as in real life, families are disrupted and made unhappy by common themes, most notably infidelity. While the one happy marriage in the novel (between Levin and Kitty) takes all sorts of unexpected, contingent twists and turns, unique to that particular couple.

A long and lovely marriage that results in a happy family is a wondrous miracle, one that each family has to create in their own way.