Roger “Butch” Karp sat on the desk, which protested briefly before accepting its burden, and looked out at his audience. He was a big man—big enough to have played pro basketball, if a knee injury in college hadn’t derailed that dream. Instead, he’d pursued a different course and worked for the New York District Attorney’s Office most of his life.

Now, thirty-plus years after law school, he was the elected DA of New York County, essentially the island of Manhattan. And he was sitting on a desk at the front of a classroom in a synagogue, getting ready to speak to bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah candidates as a “role model” from the Jewish community.

He marveled at the resilience of youth. Considering what had happened at the synagogue just a month and a half earlier, it was amazing that these kids were smiling, flirting, and laughing, seemingly undaunted by a sometimes-insane world that paralyzed many adults with fear. Yes, they had been afraid. No, they had not been defeated.

Two of the students were Karp’s twin sons, Isaac and Giancarlo, and it was because of them that he had agreed to teach the class. That his children were interested in religion at all was something of a surprise. The twins, as well as their older sister, Lucy, had been exposed to a smattering of their mother’s Roman Catholic upbringing—Marlene Ciampi had been raised in an Italian American family in Queens, and it was this heritage, more than any devotion on her part, that had predestined the children to learn the tenets of the faith.

Of the three, Lucy had been the most spiritual, having shown an inclination toward Catholic mysticism that included “visitations” from—or hallucinations of—the fifteenth-century saint Teresa of Avila during times of stress and danger. Of late her spirituality had been undergoing a transformation due to her acquaintance with John Jojola, the police chief of the Taos Indian Pueblo in New Mexico, who had become something of a Native American spiritual guide for both Lucy and Marlene. But none of the kids had ever shown much interest in the spiritual side of Judaism.

In fact, the twins’ previous religiosity had centered on holiday avarice. Giancarlo, the youngest by several minutes and the more artistically inclined, especially as a musician, had demonstrated an appreciation for the art, music, and historical significance of his parents’ heritage. However, they both were more interested in the present count at Christmas, with a little Chanukah thrown in for the food and family togetherness, than in the stories or scriptures behind the celebrations.