Central Synagogue Podcast · Central Synagogue

PODCAST: The Jewish Bookshelf: Midrash with Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD - November 24, 2025

December 3, 2025·1 hr 9 min·5 clips

Why did Lot's wife turn into a pillar of salt? Midrash imagines she was looking back for her other children left in Sodom.

Which books belong on a Jewish bookshelf? Rebecca Thao starts the Jewish Bookshelf series by asking how Jews can relate to sacred texts as Reformed Jews today. The session feels like public study rather than a polished lecture, with Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, teaching Midrash in front of an in-person audience through explanation, text work, and conversation. Hammer gets a full introduction: scholar, author, teacher, Midrashist, mystic, poet, essayist, priestess, and co-founder of the Kohenet Institute. Then the room gets to work. Thao welcomes everyone, names this as the second installation, and places it inside a year of learning. Participants receive English texts, with original-language versions available when the texts were not first written in English. They read in pairs while Thao and Hammer move through the room, answer questions, and bring everyone back into one discussion. That format fits the subject nicely. Midrash is not treated as a fixed definition to memorize. It comes alive through noticing, questioning, and answering together. Hammer keeps returning to the feeling of the text. The strongest reading starts with what catches, moves, confuses, or refuses to settle. Then comes the nerve of Midrash: a reading can look at a phrase with an obvious literal meaning and say, in effect, no, that is not all it means. Hannah becomes the case study. Hammer describes the rabbis building Hannah up and sharpening her challenge to Eli through that move. Thao closes by thanking Hammer and the audience, then points ahead to the next Jewish Bookshelf gathering on Talmud with Rabbi Dr. Ethan Tucker on Monday, December 15th at 6 p.m.

As heard by us

A warm Midrash class that makes interpretation feel newly alive.

This episode treats Midrash as a living way of reading, with Rabbi Jill Hammer showing how Jewish interpretation can move past a text's obvious sense and make a familiar passage feel newly alive.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a live Midrash conversation with depth and warmth.

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