Climate change has often been identified as an urgent political problem with little done to address it, while other “urgent” problems have garnered far greater response. What happens when nothing happens in response to urgencies? How can urgency be restored as a motivating political idea—and should it be? This paper interprets Abraham Joshua Heschel’s understanding of the realms of time and space in The Sabbath (1951) to explore the relationship between urgency and climate change. It argues that Heschel’s distinction of time and space can be understood to assert true temporal urgency against what I call material urgencies, the sense of scarcity of finite goods that we often prioritize over and against the possibility of a future together dependent on actions taken today. To recover a politically motivating sense of urgency about climate change, I argue, we must value the scarcity of time more than the scarcity of things and learn to see the difference between them.
Sabbath arrives each week to disrupt ordinary life with a wholly different way of living. Is this strictly a break from the ordinary, or also a guide to it—and to how it might require disruption, reformation, and repair? This paper argues for a reinterpretation of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath as a source of radical political imagination resonant with struggles against climate change today. Generally read as a spiritual text distant from Heschel’s political thought and celebrated involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, I argue that the book has profound resources for contemporary political struggle in its concept of time. Sabbath, for Heschel, is a “cathedral in time,” a divine gift of time set apart from the other six days of the week. Its time is spent together, sharing in its goods without competition or attempts to control. It is also filled with aspirations for what our time together might be, made urgent by each Saturday’s waning light. Sabbath time thus recasts the competitive aspirations of life in the other six days as smaller than they might appear in their moment and easily unjust, ready to turn the urgency of finitude into a mere contest with the people standing near you. But we must not let our “acquisition of things in space” overtake our “aspirations in the realm of time,” Heschel writes; time is the holier realm, though one easily abandoned by the attitudes and ambitions we learn in our competitive realm of space and things. Heschel’s distinction between the realm of time and the realm of space understood in this way is a source of deep political insight, providing a concept of time and our aspirations in it that can reframe contemporary discussions of the collective action demanded by climate change.
It might be easy to understand Heschel’s descriptions of the distinction between time and space as some kind of denigration of the world. Space is the world we know: the land, the soil, the flora, the material things we encounter and create. Time’s holiness is partly defined by its distinction from materiality, its transcendence of the world of things, and its defiance of our world’s constraints. The holiness of time might then suggest the inferiority of the world, the disappointment of its finitude and failure of its immanence. But Heschel repeatedly writes to disabuse his readers of such a rejection of the world, including in the inclusion of a traditional story of a rabbi who tries to live without the world and is corrected in his aspiration by God. Escaping the world, the story suggests, is a mistake in the pursuit of holiness. It is also a mistake that costs time: the rabbi is kept from worldly life, delayed from living well, and ultimately frustrated in his attempt to experience the infinite by escaping the finite.
This paper reads Heschel’s Sabbath, and particularly the story of the rabbi seeking to escape the world, for a consideration of time and space in ethical and political thinking about climate change. What resources does the Jewish Sabbath, and Heschel’s Sabbath, have for considering our obligations to a dangerously warming world? What warnings does it have for attempts to escape the world into a transcendent realm? And what insight does it have into how our sense of time might motivate work in the world, instead of encouraging an escape from it? This paper will set Heschel’s intellectual play with eternity and worldliness in The Sabbath in dialogue with political questions of the urgency of climate change, seeking a more powerful sense of urgency in light of the increasing possibility that political action is already too late. In the process, it will suggest important lines of comparison—and nodes of difficulty along them—with conceptions of time in other religious traditions and political perspectives.
Climate change is often identified as an urgent political problem with little done to address it, while other “urgent” problems garner far greater response. What happens when nothing happens in response to urgencies? How can urgency be restored as a motivating political idea—and should it be? This paper interprets Abraham Joshua Heschel’s understanding of the realms of time and space in The Sabbath (1951) to explore the relationship between urgency and climate change. It argues that Heschel’s distinction of time and space can be understood to assert true temporal urgency against what I call material urgencies, the sense of scarcity of finite goods that we often prioritize over and against the possibility of a future together. To recover a politically motivating sense of urgency about climate change, I argue, we must value the scarcity of time more than the scarcity of things and learn to see the difference between them.