What Amherst Lost When It Laid Off Its Rabbi

On Thursday, Jan. 29, we attended the teach-in “After Minneapolis, Thoughts on the American Condition” led by Professors Austin Sarat, Pawan Dhingra, Thomas Dumm, Nick Holscuch, Lauren Leydon-Hardy, and Leah Schmalzbauer. We were moved by the shoulder-to-shoulder presence and conviction of our peers as well as by the shrewdness and acuity of our professors’ reflections. At the same time, we left the teach-in spiritually parched. We agree with William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science Austin Sarat’s judgment that the urgency and fear we all share, if untethered from faith, risk calcifying into paralysis. Sarat’s diagnosis of our civic body as alert, but spiritually unanchored, rings true to us. A diagnosis in and of itself, however, is not a course of treatment. 

So we walked out of Pruyne Lecture Hall looking for a faith that the vocational tools of our professors do not position them to offer. And, we would argue, for good reason: A classroom is not a chapel, nor should it be. We sought to tap into a prevailing, steady well of spirituality that would scaffold a faith we could mobilize to meet the gravity of national crises materializing on the streets of Minneapolis. Generations of Jews have felt this same need. We knew what we were looking for.

We had to leave the Amherst campus to find the spiritual nourishment we craved. What we really wanted was the counsel of our campus rabbi, Rabbi Colt. But she was no longer there. Indeed, the college laid off Rabbi Shahar Colt in January after she had served just two years as campus rabbi and assistant director of Religious and Spiritual Life. In an email forwarded from President Elliot to the student body on Jan. 16, Student Affairs attributed this decision to a long-term “reenvisioning” of Religious and Spiritual Life (RSL).

We take the fact that we had to outsource religious advisory and galvanization to be a profound loss. It is one of many losses that the dubious removal of Rabbi Colt confronts the College community with. We’d like to discuss some others.

Students lost a teammate in Jewish organizing and administration. The college prioritizes the minimization of life’s drudgeries and frictions such that students can immerse themselves as robustly as possible in our academics. Chefs at Valentine Dining Hall cook our meals, custodial staff clean common spaces, and no classroom is more than a ten-minute walk away. Our attention is funneled to the ideas we have come to Amherst to doggedly pursue. For this we are very grateful and attribute much of our intellectual development.

During both of our first 14 months as Amherst College students, we encountered what we felt to be an inhibitive gap in this infrastructure. We felt unsupported in our Judaism despite partaking in a 10-week Jewish Learning Fellowship, attending Shabbat dinners with Hillel, and participating in available holiday programming. While we appreciated that these spaces were provided, they did not speak to our particular religious and spiritual practices or desires. We quickly felt adrift. We turned to the Jewish Community of Amherst (JCA), our local synagogue, and attended their Shabbat services and High Holiday gatherings. During the Days of Awe, one of us reached out to our rabbi from home for reflection prompts to process and atone independently. 

Most significantly, we took it upon ourselves to found an informal, explicitly intellectual Jewish community we call Jewish Discussion Group (JDG). We meet weekly and grow alongside one another as Jewish political constituents and thinkers. Establishing JDG took a tremendous amount of time and effort. It was a labor of love and a contribution to the college we are particularly proud of as we take stock of our years here. Still, we cannot help but wonder how we might differently embody our Judaism today were we to have been able to devote those same hours to the substantive exploration of its byways rather than to the mechanics of making our discussion group possible. 

When Colt arrived, she poured herself into propping up JDG with administrative and strategic backing while also building infrastructure of her own. Based on our observations and the reports of many who concur, it is our belief that the model of Jewish life Colt set in motion is more representative of the needs and wants of Amherst students than what came before. 

Colt immediately introduced a Friday afternoon text study group, led rich holiday services and seders, and encouraged us to lean on the RSL to fund speakers at our meetings. She cued us to opportunities throughout the Pioneer Valley in her production of weekly newsletters informing students of an array of Jewish happenings. In this regard, Colt was in lockstep with President Elliott in his emphasis that “the Town of Amherst is our home and a vital part of the fabric of the College” and “an important part of the package that attracts talented people to our campus.” Indeed, Colt knew how to make resources available to students without extinguishing the independent spirit of our informal Jewish organizing.

Our senior class possesses the institutional memory to recall what Amherst Jewish life looked like both before and after Colt. We can attest to the visceral relief and energy she surfaced upon stepping in in the Spring of 2024. We mourn the loss of her innovative programming and advisory on behalf of those students who will now have to, as we once did, devote themselves first to pioneering and maintaining Jewish communities in order to participate in them. 

Faculty and staff lost a stabilizing and impassioned colleague. As Henry Steele Commager Professor of History Catherine Epstein and Eliza J. Clark Folger Professor of English Judith Frank make clear in their Letter to the Editor on Feb. 11, Colt took up the mantle of RSL Assistant Director during “a period when there was no director, so RSL was effectively rudderless.” It should be obvious to any objective observer that assuming the assistant director role, given the dearth of resources and confounding organizational structure, would be an uphill battle. Colt went at the task ambitiously and voraciously. 

We all lost a champion of pluralistic Jewish life at the College. Rabbi Colt carried out the always difficult and often unglamorous work of actualizing a Jewish community capacious enough to hold intra-group differences, be they denominational, political, socioeconomic, or otherwise. We lost a figure who did not sort us into factions — Amherst for Israel or Jews For Ceasefire, frequent Hillel Shabbat Dinner-goers or those who abstained — but who knew and held firmly that none of us are reducible to our most visible affiliations. 

At a time in the United States when antisemitic discourses are omnipresent and antisemitism is being mendaciously invoked to justify authoritarian state crackdowns on campus dissent — thus turning Jewish student campus constituencies against one another — Colt dutifully invested in a model of Jewish life at Amherst wherein disagreement and debate felt safe and sustained diversity.

Our loss of Rabbi Colt comes as one loss in a wave of others. As The Student reported in late January, four staff members in positions across the Office of Identity and Cultural Resources  — including the Multicultural Resource Center, the Class and Access Resource Center, and with Gender and LGBTQ+ Equity and Engagement — were so too laid off. Students are left without certain enduring, institutionally-seasoned figureheads of vital hubs for identity affirmation and cross-center solidarity. As we seek faith in Jewish ritual and tradition, we know others who find sources of faith in these secular affinity spaces. And we believe that pushes for justice backed by faith — the likes of which were advocated at the January 29th teach-in — oblige us all to act in concert under the advisory of trusted leaders.

Viewed in isolation, each layoff may be defensible as administrative necessity. Viewed together, they suggest a myopic approach to community life — one that demonstrates little credence for the slow accumulation of presence and relational labor which cohere the communities these offices serve. 

If the college is serious about its commitment to supporting flourishing Jewish student life, it will need to reckon with these losses. Faith takes root in environments where institutions demonstrate reliability. The removal of Rabbi Colt makes belief in that reliability challenging to hold onto.

Rabbi Colt’s departure also leaves open a question about what kind of Jewish life the college is interested in investing in. Institutions reveal their values in what, and in whom, they are willing to lose. We are paying attention.