PACE. SHALOM. PEACE: A PRAYER ACROSS THE AGES
In revolutionary times past and present, two spiritual leaders—one a Jewish rabbi, the other a Catholic pope—raise a shared voice for unity, justice, and enduring peace.
Stories give shape to what has been left unspoken.
In Releasing Memory, we give voice to the silenced, reweave the broken, and reimagine the future—one story at a time.
At the heart of my creative mission is a belief that storytelling can collapse the boundaries of time and transform our way of seeing ourselves and one another to guide us to a new, more hopeful, and enduring vision.
A pope and a rabbi step up and step out on the world stage.
Sounds like the start of a bad joke, no?
Even if history doesn’t generally joke, it does echo in irony.
On May 17, I see twin stars circling in the moral universe: two revolutionary leaders—Hazzan Gershom Mendes Seixas, an American Jewish voice for liberty in 1776, and Pope Leo XIV, newly chosen as a spiritual leader in 2025.
Spiritual leaders carrying out their public ministries almost 250 years apart. Both voices calling for dignity in a fracturing world.
Across oceans and ages, each in his own voice has called us back to the same abiding prayer.
Pace. Shalom. Peace.
At the founding of this Republic, a “patriot rabbi” became the public voice to stand for religious liberty.
The Revolutionary Rabbi
He was the first American-born hazzan—Gershom Mendes Seixas—a Jewish leader of Sephardic heritage who rose to prominence during the American Revolution. He taught himself Hebrew to read and interpret Torah and Talmud.
His congregation made up of immigrants and the children of immigrants who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal for praying to the God of their understanding.
They now looked to America as a light, shining for religious and personal freedoms, a truth of power beholden to the people, not to kings or religious leaders masquerading as kings.
And now, centuries later, another first: Robert Francis Prevost—Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born pontiff, ascending to global spiritual leadership in a world once again riven by conflict, displacement, and intolerance.
— Both sons of immigrants.
— Both fluent in many tongues.
— Both called to lead diverse flocks in a moment of globe-upending revolution.
Seixas was born in 1745, to a family descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had fled the terrors of the Inquisition—a regime of fear and forced conversions sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church itself. Many were conversos, descended from Jews forced to convert to Catholicism if they and their families were to survive.
Yet by 1776, on the very eve of American independence, this descendant of migrants stood at the bema of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, America’s oldest Jewish congregation, formed in 1654 and with its doors open to this day, to offer a prayer for peace, even as war loomed on his city’s doorstep.
In March 1776, the Second Continental Congress ratified a proclamation calling for a “public day of fasting and prayer,” on May 17 of that year. In response, the Reverend Seixas (as he was referred to publicly) led his congregation in “A Jewish Prayer for Peace Between England and her Colonies,” with this invocation:
“May [God] once more plant an everlasting peace. . .
that war may no more pass through our land,
and that You may send the Angels of mercy
to proclaim Peace to all America and to the inhabitants thereof.”
His words pronounced from the pulpit and printed in colonial newspapers offered a radical spiritual vision at the dawn of the American experiment: freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, peace as divine mandate.
Truths we hold to be self-evident.
He would go down in history as the Patriot Jewish Minister of the American Revolution.
Across time and faith, across lands and liturgies, a new American leader reminds us of these Truths, ones we have not yet fulfilled.
The American Pope
Robert Francis Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV.
Born in 1955 in Chicago, he is a citizen of both the United States and Peru, a missionary, scholar, and Vatican insider. On May 8, 2025, he was elected by the College of Cardinals to lead the global Roman Catholic Church.
“I choose the name Leo in the spirit of a lion of peace, not of conquest,” he said.
—Vatican News Biography of Pope Leo XIV
A man who has come to lead in peace. In pace.
Where once the Church lit fires to divide, this Pope has chosen to shine a light of reunion to the world.
As bishop and cardinal, he has long spoken out for the dignity of migrants, the protection of the poor, and the Gospel imperative to welcome the stranger.
When Pope Leo XIV walked out on the Vatican loggia in Rome for the first time he, too, invoked an ancient longing, one also invoked two millennia earlier by Jesus, a rabbi, and teacher, to his disciples. Pope Leo raised a prayer to end conflict raging in us and in our world:
“La pace sia con tutti voi.”
“Let peace be with you all.”
In his first Sunday prayer address in Vatican Square, he prayed that God grant the world the "miracle of peace".
To amplify his message, the new pope’s words are streamed, subtitled, and reposted around the globe.
Two Voices, One Vision
Their clarion call for religious freedom is clear, though clearly, its realization is, even today, a work in progress.
Then: The hazzan’s prayer was read aloud in English and Hebrew, printed and posted in public newspapers to reach American and British eyes.
Now: The pope’s prayer in Italian and Spanish is live-streamed and subtitled to reach audiences around the globe.
Then: A Jewish leader petitioned heaven for peace in the midst of a war that would establish a republic built to honor a nation’s sovereignty from an imperial force, and freedom for the people.
Now: A Catholic leader speaks peace during a worldwide backlash against division, forced migration, renewed imperialism, and war.
Their words are not only holy—they are revolutionary.
While Seixas prayed during a rebellion for liberty and justice in a growing country of immigrants and the indigenous, Pope Leo prays for the world to open its heart to just treatment of immigrants, refugees, and the poor.
They share one message:
Build Bridges, Not Walls
As a bishop and later cardinal, Prevost opposed harsh immigration crackdowns and reminded Catholics that “we are all migrants”—spiritually, morally, and historically.
His pastoral work in Latin America, his embrace of multilingual liturgy, and his unwavering call to welcome the stranger speak to a church remade—not by power, but by compassion.
All religions and philosophies, at heart, contain this wisdom, the wisdom of the heart. Much like Seixas, a quarter-millennium earlier, Pope Leo XIV uses the pulpit—and the press—to amplify prayers transcending time and borders.
Bridging barriers to peace.
A Prayer for These Revolutionary Times
In May 1776, as British forces occupied New York Harbor, the Continental Congress declared a national day of fasting and prayer. From the pulpit of Shearith Israel, the Rev. Seixas cited Isaiah 2:4—ancient words that stir the conscience:
“And they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.”
Is it somehow written in the stars we should only invoke peace when wars rage around us? Or can we rather learn radical new ways to wage the peace instead?
This is the revolutionary question—then and now.
It is a question not only for nations, but for each of us.
Because peace is not imposed from above. It begins within.
“Peace is not imposed from above. It begins within.”
— Releasing Memory
To learn peace is to unlearn vengeance. To unlearn fear. To rediscover the radical hospitality of the stranger.
Peace is formed first in our hearts and minds. Only when we know peace in our own hearts can we reflect it out into the world.
This was the prayer in 1776.
This is the prayer in 2025.
As yet it remains unanswered. But hope reminds us that achieving peace is possible.
Peace remains an inside job; it is up to us all to do the inner work. Our potential to wage the peace is stronger when we seek it first in our hearts.
Renewing the Call: Pace, Shalom, Peace
In this season of sky-turning, of nation churning, we find ourselves suspended in the chrysalis of unknown changes.
The old world clings—its systems rigid, its stories worn smooth with repetition. Destroying itself from the inside out.
It resists dissolution. It tightens its grip around identity, borders, and power. It fears what comes next.
And yet, beneath that skin, that chrysalis, something wild and holy stirs.
Imaginal cells awaken—those who remember the shape of a world not yet born.
We are the artists. Healers. Dreamers. Witnesses. Builders of bridges and breakers of silence.
We do not come as conquerors.
We come as storytellers.
You feel yourself being pulled somewhere new, yet we can’t see that which is emerging.
At first, we reject these impulses—too tender, too new, too strange. But they persist. And in communion, they become a new body.
A butterfly born from resistance.
Freedom shaped in fire.
This is not the end.
This is the great beginning.
How can we carry forward the prayers of our forebears—all those who’ve dreamed peace across centuries of war.
How can we burn not with destruction, but candles lit in the fire of transformation.
How can we turn silence into song.
Pace. Shalom. Peace.
A whisper. A wish. A prayer across generations.
Might this be the cry that stirs the future awake?
What if we dared to turn swords into plowshares—not just in policy, but in practice?
What if we taught peace not as an ideal, but as a daily, imperfect craft—to our children, and to the stranger at our gate?
What if their prayers—Seixas’s and Leo’s—are not just echoes, but invitations? Not a conclusion, but a conversation that continues: continuity.
And if your heart inclines to it, how can we join hands to continue that conversation together, even if it is to say simply:
A beautiful and thoughtful reflection, Robin. Thank you for introducing me to Hazzan Seixas. I’d love to visit his synagogue!
Robin, what a powerful essay you've written here on two extraordinary spiritual leaders (and both sons of immigrants at that!)--thank you for sharing the voice and vision of these great visionaries. I am particularly struck by "Is it somehow written in the stars we should only invoke peace when wars rage around us? Or can we rather learn radical new ways to wage the peace instead?" To this day I am still inspired by the non-violent stand taken up Martin Luther King and Gandhi. Let us hold to this notion that all acts of peace--big or small--are necessary and important and as you are reminding us, start from within! Thank you!