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Adir
Hu |
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This song, sung during the Seder service, means in English ‘Mighty is He’. It switches between proclaiming the virtues of God in an alphabetical format and expressing hope that God will ‘rebuild the Holy Temple speedily’.
The traditional melody has gone through several variations over the years, but its origin is from the German minnesinger period - the tradition of lyric and song derived from the word minne, Middle High German for love, which flourished in the 12th to 14th centuries. The author is unknown although the earliest existing music for Adir Hu is found in the 1644 Hagaddah published by J. S. Rittangel, professor of Oriental languages at Königsberg. 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.
Click here to download the English translation of the song (12Kb PDF)
Click here to download the Hebrew translation of the song (232Kb PDF)
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