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Sacred Reciprocity:
A Conversation on Jewish Ecopoetry with Hila Ratzabi

By Elizabeth Jacobson

One definition of Jewish ecopoetry would be poetry that is grounded in the sacred reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment.
 

Introduction

Hila Ratzabi
Hila Ratzabi.
Photo by Paul Goyette.
Hila Ratzabi’s first full-length book of poetry, There Are Still Woods, was published in September 2022 by June Road Press. It received the 2023 Nautilus Book Award Gold Winner in Poetry and is a 17th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist. There Are Still Woods is a stunning consideration of life at the edge of climate crisis and a poignant lament for all we may lose.

Ratzabi says that while she was writing these poems, she came to see her work as ecopoetry and began to more deeply explore this sub-genre. She later began to notice the intersectionality between her own Jewish identity, values, and practices and her ecopoetry. While there is a wide range of expression of Jewish belief and practice today, the notion of an interdependence with the greater natural world through thought and language is emphasized across many Jewish texts, from ancient to modern. These values fit tightly into the ideas of ecopoetry, that is, poetry in conversation with the environment.

Ratzabi received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2007. She has since taught workshops privately and in partnership with various organizations for many years, in addition to working as an editor, and currently serves as director of communications for a Chicago-area synagogue. 

We are at a historical moment of social crises and war that calls for the inclusivity and compassion that poetry can create.

Conversation

Elizabeth Jacobson: At the end of August 2022, poet Jessica Jacobs sent out an email introducing Yetzirah, a new literary organization for Jewish poets—along the lines of Cave Canem for poets of African-American heritage and Canto Mundo for Latinx poets—and with that an invitation to add a profile to the “discover Jewish poets” tab on the website. You emailed me a few months later, introducing yourself and explaining that you had found my work through the Yetzirah website and were going to be teaching a Jewish ecopoetry class. In outlining this course, you said you had essentially created a new sub-genre of ecopoetry, joining other cultural sub-genres of ecopoetry documented in anthologies like Black Nature and Queer Nature. It would be great to hear about your background as a poet and educator and your thought process in defining this new sub-genre.

Hila Ratzabi: Around 2012 or so, when I first started writing the poems that eventually became There Are Still Woods, I perused many anthologies, including The Ecopoetry Anthology, Black Nature, Earth Shattering, and others. Through that study, I began to design private ecopoetry workshops, specifically an urban nature workshop series I led when I lived in Philadelphia. Creating those workshops was a natural outgrowth of my study and gave me a forum in which to share and deepen that study in community.

At the time, I hadn’t thought of my poems as particularly Jewish, but I have always been deeply engaged in Jewish study and practice over the years (I did a double degree in English and Jewish philosophy in college). When I was doing final edits on my book in the summer of 2022, I started to notice the Jewish thread in the book and the ways in which those Jewish themes and tropes were interwoven with the environmental themes. That’s when the term “Jewish ecopoetry” came to my mind. I was deeply influenced by the Black Nature anthology, which taught me to recognize the ways in which racial and cultural identity intersects with, and complicates, writing on the environment. I saw how Black poets’ relationship with nature burst the Romantic bubble that idealized the human relationship with nature. As I reread my book, consciously looking for the intersections of Jewish and environmental themes, it became clear that my rootedness in Judaism was very apparent in the poetry, specifically in the language through which I imagine the Divine in nature and the responsibility I feel toward the Earth, which comes from the Jewish teachings that shaped me. I wondered whether there were other poets who wrote along these lines.

There are Still Woods: Poems by Hila RatzabiAt the time I was director of virtual content and programs at Ritualwell.org, a repository of contemporary Jewish rituals, liturgy, and poetry. Among the many online learning programs we offered, I decided to design a Jewish ecopoetry course. I started by going through all the ecopoetry anthologies I’d collected looking for Jewish poets and themes. This was where the Yetzirah database became very helpful. I was able to check the database to see if a poet I thought might be Jewish actually was. Beyond that, I did a lot of Googling! Later, I just sat there on the Yetzirah website clicking on poet after poet on the database and reading their sample poems (filtered by poets who write about the environment). That’s where I found you and your incredible poem, “There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral,” which I immediately recognized as a quintessential “Jewish ecopoem”—this was exactly what I was looking for!

The other quintessential Jewish ecopoem I discovered at that time was “Way Too Late” by Mónica Gomery. Once I had those poems, I realized I was onto something. Here was proof that the sub-genre I’d imagined actually existed, but as far as I could tell, no one had designated it as such until now. I kept finding more and more poems: contemporary, modern, 19th-century Yiddish poets (like Rokhl Korn), and Israeli poets like Chaim Nachman Bialik and Natan Zach. I also wove in examples of Jewish liturgy, Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts, and philosophy, that speak to the intersection of Judaism and environmental themes in a way that informs the poems. This turned into a six-session online course, though I feel like the material I found was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Elizabeth Jacobson: In their seminal book, Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, Forrest Gander and John Kinsella write, “I myself, am less interested in ‘nature poetry’—where nature features as a theme—than in poetry that investigates—both thematically and formally—the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception.” This is, I think, a basic definition of what an ecopoem can be. Essentially, it is a nature poem with a fistful of human thinking about ethics, ethnicity, and commenting on and taking responsibility for the human role in the exploitation of the greater wild world. An ecopoem puts the human being in a relationship with nature that is beyond an ecstatic experience of great beauty, investigating the complexities and politics of this relationship with an emphasis on drawing connections between human activity and the environment. Still, it is difficult to pinpoint a static definition as new themes and possibilities are continually evolving. What would you add to the definition of an ecopoem? Gander and Kinsella go on to say, “Poets operate in communities, and their ecologies are crosshatched. They connect and divide communities that aren’t even aware of their existence. A poem is a part of an ecology—.” This relates perfectly with what you are describing above and prompts another query about Jewish ecopoetics: Are Jewish ecopoems environmental poems written by a Jewish person, or do they specifically contain Jewish themes, history, philosophy, language, and so on like in Mónica Gomery’s poem “Way Too Late”? Here Gomery uses the Hebrew word, Tehilim, psalms, and then the poem continues, describing her peoples’ millennia-long devotion to the natural world:

                                 Ecopoem—
I hate that, because my people
have written them for millennia,
we call them Tehilim,
they are kindnesses, are credit,
consequence, self-
condemnation, and the root
word means to shine a light,
to illuminate with awe, the kind
of awe that implicates. A litany
of cedar trees and riverbanks
and howling braying mammals
is not a comfort, not pastoral
but a clamp-song fastening,
a heap and rapture over We.
We did the research, the professor
tells me, kids in America
use I and Me eleven times more
than We and Us,
is it too late for this?
I call R on my dog walk
say, how’s today? She says,
my baby’s breathing burning
trees, we stayed inside all week.

Mónica Gomery
Poet and rabbi Mónica Gomery.
Photo by Jess Benjamin.

Hila Ratzabi: I think Gomery’s poem is an excellent anchoring text for a definition of Jewish ecopoetry, specifically the phrase, “the kind of awe that implicates.” This feels like a definition of Jewish ethics, even before we talk about ecology: that out of an experience of awe we are implicated by a sense of responsibility. As you say: “a relationship with nature that is beyond an ecstatic experience of great beauty.” I think a Jewish approach to environmental ethics begins with some version of that ecstatic experience, to fully know and feel bodily our connection to nature—and whatever divine force might be expressing itself through nature—and by extension through us. The natural result of that connection is a feeling of both interdependence and responsibility. Jewish ethics articulates and concretizes this interdependence through the language and structure of the biblical covenant: if you do x, y, and z it will rain at the right times and your crops will grow; if you don’t, they won’t. Jewish ethics and theology were, from their inception, inseparable from ecology, since the ancient Israelites were an agrarian people. Therefore, one definition of Jewish ecopoetry would be poetry that is grounded in the sacred reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment. I think Jewish ecopoetry would therefore go beyond merely ecopoetry written by those who identify as Jewish and include some reference to either Jewish texts, history, culture, or ideas.

When I first started this research, I looked at ecopoems written by Jews to see where the Jewish themes might or might not sneak in, whether consciously or unconsciously. I even did this as I reread my own poems. In fact, my poem “Goat,” in There Are Still Woods, is a perfect example of a Jewish ecopoem that I didn’t realize contained Jewish themes until someone else pointed this out. The poem describes an encounter I had with a goat on a farm next door to a writing residency I was attending. I met a one-horned goat named Eon, who was super friendly, like a dog, as goats tend to be. When I asked the farmer why the goat only had one horn, he explained that they burn off goats’ horns for safety, and this time they hadn’t done it quite right. I asked if this process is painful and he said, yes, just for 30 minutes. And he continued to sort of shake his head in shame as we talked, repeating, “We didn’t get it quite right.” The poem concludes with: “I absorb his confession, but I don’t know / what to do with it.” Because what do you do with that knowledge? How should we care for the animals we are in relationship with? These are essential Jewish ethical questions. I felt implicated as a visitor to the farm, as someone who experienced a moment of connection to the goat, but I am not the farmer who cares for his goats on a daily basis, who has to make these decisions. A rabbi read this poem and told me she saw in it reference to the confessions we recite in the Yom Kippur liturgy, when we collectively atone for our transgressions. She was absolutely correct to apply that framework, but I hadn’t been thinking about it when I wrote the poem.

Elizabeth Jacobson: One section of your Jewish ecopoetry course focuses on the ways in which an examination of Jewish trauma finds expression in nature poetry, and how environmental destruction has parallels in the history of persecution of Jews. I see this intersection in Adrienne Rich’s poem “What Kind of Times Are These” as well as themes of fear and tsuris or sorrow which are represented in the last two lines of the first and second stanzas: 

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

Rich’s poem continues in the last stanza with a plea for climate justice:

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

In “Primer,” a poem about childhood by Jessica Jacobs, another theme of Jewish identity rushes forth metaphorically, that of assimilation, of finding a place to be safe, to hide—the need to hide:

A Florida child knows the safest part
of a lake is the middle. That gators
and moccasins shade in the lilies, hunker
at the shoreline in the muck right past
the trucked-in sand.

What other themes might you see in Rich’s and Jacobs’s poems? Do you see these themes, or others, at the juncture of climate justice and Jewish thought in the ecopoems of other Jewish poets?

Jessica Jacobs
Poet and Yetzirah founder, president, and executive director Jessica Jacobs.
Photo by Parker J. Pfister.

Hila Ratzabi: “Primer” feels like a Jewish ecopoem only because we know Jacobs is Jewish. Without knowing that, it can be read more broadly. (Generally, I try not to read too much of a poet’s biography into a poem, but in the context of this conversation, it seems fair enough to do so!) There isn’t anything in the poem itself that alludes to what the gators and snakes might represent—just a general source of malice and danger. But read Jewishly, they can represent the constant threat of violence that comes from living under white supremacy and the state of hypervigilance that awakens in the person to whom that violence is directed. As an ecopoem, it challenges the tradition of Romantic nature poetry (more on that in answer to the question below) that idealizes nature as a site of calm contemplation of beauty. Jacobs’s Florida is booby-trapped with dangers, and to reach the calm center of the lake requires a courageous act of the imagination.

Rich’s poem is an excellent example of a Jewish ecopoem, because the presence (or absence) of the persecuted is directly tied to the natural environment. The place, the exact location, of the poem is crucial, so crucial that the speaker insists, twice, that she can’t divulge where it is. (We are left wondering why. What are the potential consequences of naming that place?) The poem begins and ends with the trees, emphasizing their importance as a frame of the scene; the trees provide cover for the disappearance of the persecuted. Nature is a site of atrocity, not an idyll.

Elizabeth Jacobson: Wordsworth said, “Nature poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” If we look at different trends in “nature poetry” from the Romantics to the Transcendentalists to what we now call ecopoetry, we see a shift in the way the human, or the speaker of the poem, is placed in the greater wild world and their observations. The world is different. We are different. I am interested in what you think about this, what you see as a progression from these other schools of poetry to where we are now with “nature poetry.”

Hila Ratzabi: Ecopoetry critiques the Romantic and Transcendentalist traditions of nature poetry by shifting the vantage point of the human being in relationship to nature. We are no longer the center of the scene, gazing upon nature in wonder, but part of nature, complicit in our treatment of nature, and inextricably dependent upon it. Ecopoetry acknowledges the human culpability in the destruction of nature and seeks to heal that rupture by repositioning the relationship between human and nature.

This critique also extends to the intersection between nature and identity in ecopoetry. Nature is not an idyll for everyone. Camille T. Dungy writes about this idea in the Black Nature anthology. For Black poets, historically, nature is not often a place of comfort and contemplation, but one of danger. This is also true of some Jewish poets. There is no tranquility to be found in the natural landscapes of the poems we read above.

One example of this is the poetry of Rokhl Korn, a Yiddish poet who wrote many nature poems, some of which describe the harrowing experience of losing family members in the Holocaust, being displaced, and becoming a refugee. Nature, in some of her poems, is a wilderness of loss, trauma, and homelessness. For example, in “To My Daughter,” the earth itself erupts in “blood and terror” as mother and daughter flee violence and danger. The concept of the Shekhinah (the feminine, immanent presence of God that is often associated with nature) comes to mind as I read this poem. The Shekhinah is said to accompany the Jews, wandering alongside us in exile. In this poem, nature accompanies the speaker through her grief and exile: “The flowering acacias went the heavy way of exile / with the sky and us.”

To My Daughter

By Rokhl Korn, translated by Seymour Levitan

 
When I led you out, the earth spurted blood and terror
with every step we took,
the greatest good was sudden death,
and a mother’s blessing—the sure mercy of a bullet for her child.

The flowering acacias went the heavy way of exile
with the sky and us,
the air was burdened with their scent,
breathless, sweet, stifling in tears.

I wasn’t brave enough to look back,
and when I saw my home and my mother’s face in dreams,
I went grey.
My eyes are dry, but all my steps are tears.

How many lives are left to pray for?
How many graves am I closer to the earth?
What door will take me in
and where am I destined to fall?

You and I—the only two left of all our kin,
and I entrusted your young life to a star,
as my mother entrusted her quiet prayer,
my grandmother, her burning tears, to God.

Only you and I—and if I don’t make it through,
my mother’s prayer is crying in your blood.
The call of all those generations is ripening in you,
our village path is waiting for your step.

 
Moscow, 1944
 

Rokhl Häring Korn
Yiddish poet Rokhl Häring Korn in 1970.
Photograph by Federal Photos, Montreal, courtesy of Dr. Irene Kupferszmidt and the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Elizabeth Jacobson: At first I thought that Rokhl Korn’s poem was a formidable illustration of how nature can feature thematically in a poem without being classified as an ecopoem, but now I am not sure. Do you see Korn’s poem as a Jewish ecopoem?

Hila Ratzabi: If we are talking about ecopoetry very narrowly as poetry that speaks of environmental issues, then the Korn poem is not a Jewish ecopoem. More broadly I am thinking about nature poetry and how a Jewish lens complicates what we think of as nature poetry. I had a session of my Jewish ecopoetry class that was about nature and trauma, which included some of Korn’s poems (and your coral poem). In my mind, Korn’s poems, which are heavily connected to nature, are examples of how nature becomes a site for exploring trauma, grief, displacement, and so on. This is similar to what Dungy describes in her introduction to the Black Nature anthology: “There are many people in this world and certainly in this country for whom you don’t go wandering off into the woods to find solace. That is a place that has a legacy of trauma in the very soil and the trees that are there.”

Elizabeth Jacobson: Thank you, Hila, for having this conversation with me. Defining what an ecopoem is has grown since Gander and Kinsella wrote Redstart from place-based environmental poems to poems venturing into all types of shared human and environmental ecologies, and I love how in the all-embracing genre of ecopoetry we find, as poets, as people, and as Jews, a mutual sense of humanity in which all life is valued. What final thoughts might you have about Jewish ecopoetry, and where will you take this new sub-genre from here?

Hila Ratzabi: While I was writing my book, I often thought, “Do we really need more environmental poems? Hasn’t everything been said already? Does this type of poetry matter right now, and will it make a difference?” After I came out with my book and started doing readings, teaching, and connecting to more and more poets writing on climate crisis, I realized, yes, absolutely we need more poems that deeply explore our human relationship to nature and our place in this moment of crisis. Poetry can allow us to re-see the world of which we human beings are one small but crucial part. We are also at a historical moment of social crises and war that calls for the inclusivity and compassion that poetry can create. Ecopoetry in general can offer us a wide lens in which to explore the human relationship to nature; ecopoetry with a culturally specific lens, like Jewish ecopoetry and other intersectional ecopoetries, can help us to situate that relationship historically, culturally, and spiritually, to reveal the many ways in which nature holds all of our stories, our languages, our migrations, our griefs, and, ultimately, our potential for healing what is broken in this world.
 

Learn more about Hila Ratzabi at hilaratzabi.com.
 

Poem Credits

“What Kind of Times Are These” reprinted from Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.  Copyright © 1995 Adrienne Rich. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

“To My Daughter,” from Paper Roses (Papirene royzn): Selected Poems of Rachel Korn, translated by Seymour Levitan (Aya Press, 1985).

Poems by Mónica Gomery and Jessica Jacobs used by permission of the authors.

 
 

Elizabeth JacobsonElizabeth Jacobson’s third collection of poems, There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press in 2025. Her previous book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch, and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away: Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (2021), which she co-edited. Elizabeth was the fifth poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is a reviews editor for Terrain.org. Find her recent work at linktr.ee/ElizabethJacobson.

Read poetry by Elizabeth Jacobson appearing in Terrain.org: “Allegory with Fiestaware” and “Landscape with Ordinary Things.”

Header photo by Tom Tom, courtesy Shutterstock.