Jewish and Israeli Music
Religious music:
Historical • Contemporary Piyyut • Zemirot • Nigun Pizmonim • Baqashot
Secular music:
Israeli • Klezmer • Sephardic • Mizrahi
Not Jewish in Form: Classical • Mainstream and Jazz
Dance:
Israeli Folk Dancing • Ballet Horah • Hava Nagila • Yemenite dance
Israel
Hatikvah • Jerusalem of Gold
Piyyutim
Adon Olam • Geshem • Lekhah Dodi Ma'oz Tzur • Yedid Nefesh • Yigdal
Music for Holidays
Hanukkah • Passover • Shabbat
Music of the Haggadah
Ma Nishtana • Dayenu • Adir Hu Chad Gadya • Echad Mi Yodea
Music of Hanukkah
Blessings • Oh Chanukah • Dreidel Song
Al Hanisim • Mi Y'malel • Ner Li

Adir Hu (English: Mighty is He, Hebrew אדיר הוּא) is a hymn sung by Jews worldwide at the Passover Seder. It switches rapidly between saying the virtues of God in an alphabet format (Aleph, Bet, Gimmel,...), and expressing hope that God will "rebuild the Holy Temple speedily." Most of the virtues of God are adjectives (for instance, Holy (Kadosh) is he); however, a few are nouns. (Lord is he).

Adir Hu is sung towards the end of the Seder. The traditional melody is a bouncy, major one.^[1] Other melodies, however, have been composed for the alphabetical song.^[2]

[edit] History

The tune of Adir Hu has gone through several variations over the years, but its origin is from the German minnesinger period. The earliest existing music for Adir Hu is found in the 1644 "Rittangel Hagada". The second form is found in the 1677 "Hagada Zevach Pesach", and the third and closest form can be found in the 1769 "Selig Hagada". In the 1769 version of the haggadah, the song was also known in German as the "Baugesang" (the song of the rebuilding of the Temple). A traditional German greeting on the night of Passover after leaving the synagogue was "Bau Gut" ("build well"), a reference to Adir Hu.

[edit] Text

[edit] See also

• Passover Seder
• Passover

[edit] External links

• Hebrew text, transliteration, translation from the Zemirot Database

[edit] References

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