“We Don’t Understand this Present”: Shimon Adaf’s Shadrach and the Possibilities of Hebrew Language

Summary

This is a work of literary criticism, not an NLP study. It has no data, corpus or model. Baroukh asks how Shimon Adaf's novella Shadrach (2017) imagines the future of Hebrew. The work mixes post-apocalypse, dystopia and science fiction. Its core question is whether a language can be drained of its historical and religious charge, and what could revive it afterwards. She reads the book alongside Gershom Scholem's 1926 letter to Rosenzweig, which warned that secularized Hebrew hides an abyss under its speakers. She also draws on Levinas, Berger, Sisk, Han and Peterson's survey of invented languages. In the future town of "New Sderot", people speak a Hebrew whose words have lost their roots. After a catastrophic attack, a restoration movement tries to recover the forgotten texts. The author finds three responses to this loss. One looks back to the past, a second is linguistic invention, and a third leaves language entirely. Her thesis is that Hebrew is renewed only when a real meeting with an Other joins past and future. She reads the novella's non-gendered, invented speech as a utopian answer to Scholem's dystopic warning.

Key points

• Published in Yod 23 (2021), pp. 151–168. Adaf, born 1972, has fifteen books, and Shadrach is linked to his Rose of Judea trilogy (Nuntia, Mox Nox, De Urbibus Inferis).
• In the plot, the Zen-Americans bomb Israel with nano-gas, and a dome shields New Sderot and Gaza. Shadrach later undergoes "Seraphizing" (Histarfut) and lands in 1987 inside the mind of 15-year-old Hannania. The two gradually fuse into "Shadrachannania", echoing the renaming in the Book of Daniel.
• Old symbols resurface in New Sderot without being recognized. Magen David and El Shaday appear on capes as unexplained signs. The leader Zamir argues that the community cannot grasp its present without knowing where its expressions come from.
• The theoretical frame includes:
  • Scholem's claim that Hebrew's "secularization" is only a manner of speaking;
  • Levinas's contrast between the returning Odyssean journey and the one-way Abrahamic journey;
  • Berger's reading of apocalypse as unveiling;
  • Sisk's view that language is central to dystopia.
• The paper's keywords include conlang, and it uses Peterson's (2015) glossary of language-invention terms to discuss the novella's constructed, non-gendered Hebrew.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The novella's speakers keep using words and symbols whose historical sense is gone, so form survives while background meaning does not; separating these layers helps explain partial understanding. — For Mova (world): ontology entries could store a term's surface use apart from its cultural or etymological frame, so the reader can flag when a text uses a loaded term without that background.
• I2. The Odyssean vs Abrahamic distinction contrasts journeys that come back to their origin with journeys that cannot return, which is a clean event-structure feature. — For Mova (world): event ordering could tag each journey as round-trip or one-way, which supports questions like "did the hero return home?"
• I3. Shadrach and Hannania start as separate characters and end as a single merged consciousness, and the merge is foreshadowed by a biblical renaming. — For Mova (frames): coreference should allow two entities to merge mid-story and should treat renaming as an alias link, rather than fixing identities at first mention.
• I4. Zamir's complaint is that people repeat expressions without knowing their source, which separates using a word from knowing where it comes from. — For Mova (answer): readers could expose whether an answer rests on the text itself or on outside knowledge of a term's origin, keeping explanations honest about what was actually read.