By Maria Bregman
There is a particular kind of literary reverence reserved for the ‘crisis of faith’ novel. We are invited, with hushed solemnity, to witness a soul in turmoil, caught between the ancient strictures of belief and the glittering, amoral freedoms of the modern world. The publisher’s blurbs for David Hopfen’s debut, Pardes, position it squarely in this tradition, a masculine, Floridian companion to the terrors of Unorthodox. We are promised profound theological debates, adolescent angst, and the search for God amidst the swimming pools of the sunshine state. One is tempted to sigh. Because whilst Pardes is indeed about a crisis, it is not the one its marketing, or indeed its earnest admirers, would have you believe. The novel’s real engine, the source of its narrative torque, is not a crisis of the soul, but a crisis of the wallet – and of the social currency that wallet commands.
Hopfen’s book is a startlingly astute, if perhaps unintentional, ethnography of modern religion as a consumer lifestyle brand. The central drama is not about God; it’s about class.
The story’s protagonist, seventeen-year-old Aryeh Eden, is a refugee. Not from war or famine, but from a form of Judaism that has become economically and culturally obsolete in his new environment. He and his family are economic migrants, moving from the austere, intellectually-rich but materially-poor world of ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn to the bewildering landscape of affluent, ‘modern’ Orthodox Florida. This is a world, we are told in a moment of sublime anthropological observation, where the community may not eat pork, but sees no contradiction in tucking into lobster. This isn’t a theological distinction; it is a declaration of tax bracket. It signals a religion that has made its peace with capital, that has sanded down its inconvenient edges to fit snugly into the contours of American aspirational living. The family’s old life, with its ‘mortal sin’ of boys and girls swimming together, is not just spiritually different; it is a lower-status existence. Their piety is the wrong brand.
The Gilded Cage and the Price of Admission
Aryeh’s disorientation is consistently framed as spiritual or social, but its roots are purely economic. His horror at the pool parties, the casual wealth, the men in their ‘Burberry’ polo shirts and the women in their cocktail dresses, is the shock of a prole stumbling into the lord’s manor. He feels ‘socially inadequate’ not because he lacks faith, but because he lacks the correct semiotic codes of the wealthy. His traditional knowledge, the intricate world of Talmudic debate and yeshiva scholarship, is a devalued currency here. It grants him a certain exotic cachet in a literature class, but it cannot buy him a seat at the table – or, more accurately, a chaise longue by the pool.
This is the true, unspoken schism at the heart of Hopfen’s Florida: a chasm not between the sacred and the profane, but between inherited piety and the kind of aggressive, aspirational wealth that requires its own set of theological workarounds and luxury brand totems. It is, in short, a market. And Aryeh, upon arrival, is bankrupt. His journey is not one of finding or losing God, but of desperately trying to acquire the social and cultural capital needed to survive in this new, predatory ecosystem. His intelligence, his ability to craft ‘shiçkar’ essays, becomes his only asset, a tool to leverage for entry into the ‘cool kids’ clique, which is itself a microcosm of the adult society around it: a brutal hierarchy of status, beauty, and inherited confidence.
Of course, one could read this, as its champions do, as a profound tale of adolescent spiritual wrestling. The long, philosophical conversations with the local rebbe, the protagonist’s intellectual fixation on the mystical concept of Pardes – the four levels of scriptural interpretation – are presented as the novel’s weighty core. But this reading feels, to me, like a misdirection. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the theological searching seems less a cause of Aryeh’s anguish and more a consequence of it. It is a retreat. When faced with a world whose rules you cannot comprehend, you fall back on the language you know. The hermeneutics of the Torah are a safe space compared to the terrifyingly opaque semiotics of the poolside clique. Debating the divine is an anaesthetic for the pain of social exclusion. It’s an intellectual panic room.
The truly devastating moments in the book are not the spiritual ones. They are the small, venal transactions of social climbing. They are in Aryeh’s quiet terror when he first enters a party, his fumbling attempts to mimic the casual nonchalance of his peers, his pathetic gratitude for any scrap of attention from the local princelings. He is less a pilgrim on a spiritual journey and more a provincial painter, armed with raw talent but no connections, arriving in the cut-throat gallery scene of 1980s New York. He can see the beauty, he can appreciate the craft, but he has no idea how the deals are made, who holds the power, or how to get his own work on the wall. The gallery owners, like his new peers, speak a language of effortless cool that is designed expressly to exclude those not born to it.
God in the Glare of the Pool Lights
I remember, some years ago, attending a rather grand dinner at a country house, hosted by a family that had recently ‘found’ a rather fashionable, high-church variant of Anglicanism. The conversation was a dizzying blend of property prices in the Cotswolds, the difficulty of finding good staff, and the precise liturgical significance of the incense being used at evensong. The wine was ruinously expensive; the piety was impeccable. It struck me then, as it strikes me now reading Pardes, that for a certain class, religion is not a refuge from the world, but another way of conquering it. It is a form of branding, a way of laundering wealth into virtue, of creating exclusive communities built on shared consumer choices disguised as shared beliefs.
The tragedy of Aryeh’s story is not that he gets drunk, or breaks shomer negiah (the laws governing physical contact). These are merely the symptoms. The tragedy is that he is forced to trade his authentic self – the ‘gifted, but very shy’ boy from Brooklyn – for a counterfeit version that might, just might, be accepted by the new regime. He is learning that in this gilded world, piety is performative, and the performance is expensive. His internal list of transgressions – ‘deceived my parents, forgot to put on tefillin’ – reads less like a sinner’s confession and more like an expense report from his campaign of assimilation. Each sin is a chit cashed in for a moment of belonging.
It is a load of old cobblers to suggest the central tension is a choice between a life of the mind and a life of the flesh.
That’s far too simple.
The real, agonising choice is between two different economies of the spirit. One, the yeshiva world, offers salvation at the price of worldly experience. The other, the Florida world, offers worldly success at the price of, well, everything else. The adolescent hormones and first-love agonies are not the story; they are the collateral damage of this brutal economic negotiation. The novel’s power, therefore, lies not in its philosophising, but in its portrait of a boy discovering the most crushing of modern truths: that even one’s relationship with God is subject to the unforgiving logic of the market. The central question is not ‘How do I find Pardes?’ but ‘What is the entrance fee?’ The price of entry is one’s soul, but the lease on belonging is, it turns out, perpetually up for renewal.
