Urgency at the End of the World: Worldliness and Temporality in Heschel’s Sabbath

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.