What is different about this night?  On this night, we're going to reflect on our story of freedom through music.  We'll go back and forth from the ritual actions of Four Questions, Motzi, Maror, 10 Drops, and so on, to and from listening to our story and its meaning through musical expression.  In so doing, our job is to  experience  the seder in a different way, not as reading, not as discussion, but as the expression of the heart.  It's one thing to hold a piece of matzah and say, "This is the bread of the poor person" justaposed with "this karpas is a luxurious appetizer," and it's quite another thing to hear this juxtapostion through the music of Iowa songwriter legend Greg Brown's "Whodu Thunk It?" which is a plaintive song about how the "living with just enough" attitude [the simple matzah was enough] of our youth gives way to our taking-for-granted bourgeois middle-class ways of good wine and nice homes.   Instead of reading these sections, we experience the meaning of their juxtaposition. Or we answer the child's question of why we're doing this by rehearsing artists like Bob Marley who embraced the Exodus narrative by saying, "Because all we ever have are these Redemption songs."  

So take the musical journey with us, and open your hearts to the Musical Experience of the Haggadah.


haggadah Section: Introduction
Source: Rabbi Nadav Caine