This month, we lost an amazing man — Rabbi Elliott Spar. Elliott was a colleague, a friend, and a mentor. One of his children, Ari Spar, is a member of our shul. For almost four decades, he was the rabbi of the Temple Beth Shalom congregation in Smithtown, the same pulpit for his entire rabbinate. He retired here in Mattituck.

I first met Elliott as my student, when Dr. Don Russo and I began our Project Genesis interfaith lecture series at the Universalist Unitarian Church in Southold. I had heard his name, but I didn’t know that the balding, yarmulka-less man sitting in one of the back rows was Rabbi Spar. For several years, I resisted recording our lectures, an inadvertent inaccuracy on record forever.

Finally, I agreed to do it, but I was extremely nervous. Somehow, this man knew to come over to me a minute before the “cameras were rolling.” He introduced himself, and complimented me on my work and the interfaith initiative. In one second, my anxiety dissipated.
We became instant friends, and I came to understand that I was not dealing with an ordinary rabbi.

As described by other friends and colleges, Rabbi Spar was a maverick, anything but conventional and predictable. He was involved in interfaith before it was popular, inviting church groups to his services. At his grandson’s bar mitzvah at our shul three years ago, he surprised everybody by inviting a gospel singer with whom he had secretly practiced for months. He was also ahead of his time regarding women’s
participation in services, and also at officiating at same-sex marriages.

One of the stories told at the shiva for Rabbi Spar shocked me, but didn’t surprise me. The story concerned a bat mitzvah girl with whom he had traveled to Jerusalem. The morning of the event at the Kotel, he told her to dress up in pants, gather hair under a baseball cap, and put on a tallit. And there you have it — Spar’s version of Yentl celebrating her bat mitzvah in the men’s section.
Sometimes you need a rebel with a cause to move the wheels of progress forward. When the needs of the people are knocking at the gates of tradition, someone has to open the door. As the Talmud tells us in some famous halachik turning points, “See what the people are doing.” Sometimes you need to love tradition enough to change it.

Is it worth it to be rebellious? In many ways, you pay high prices for that. But being a rebel is an essence, not a choice. In fact, before his death, Elliott had just finished an autobiographical account titled Rebel Rabbi, which will be published soon. As readers will learn, he was able to be a rebel with respect to all. To be a rebel that brings about change is a talent. One of his assistants wrote that Rabbi Spar epitomized Rabbi Israel Salanter’s aphorism, “A rabbi whose community does not disagree with him is not a rabbi. A rabbi who fears his community is no mentsch.”

As a testimony to that, hundreds of people attended his funeral, and many more wrote letters and made calls to his family to express their gratitude. May his memory and courage inspire us for many years to come.

And may we all enjoy a peaceful 2023.

Rabbi Gadi Capela