This year, amid the health crisis of Covid-19, rising unemployment and near-nationwide quarantine, Pasek and Kantor knew they needed to dip into their creative circles of colleagues, friends and friends of friends (of friends) to help share the story, with all its modern resonances, with a much larger audience. And to raise money while doing so.

“At the Seder table, we ask ourselves, ‘What can you do for people who are suffering because you once suffered?’” Pasek said. “We want to amplify that message because it is one of hope and also one that asks people to give of themselves however they can.”

Kantor, whose sister-in-law is a new mother and a nurse practitioner caring for Covid-19 patients at Bellevue Hospital in New York, helped write songs and wrangle actors, and he is overseeing the fund-raising drive to benefit the C.D.C. Foundation. “We want to support the front lines,” he said.

The “Saturday Night Seder” team, including the writers Alex Edelman and Hannah Friedman; musical arrangers like Charlie Rosen and Ben Wexler; and the composer Shaina Taub, among many others, had about two weeks to put it together, using Slack, Dropbox, Zoom and a color-coded Google Sheet full of Talmudic detail that producers like Talia Halperin used to manage the rehearsal and taping availability of rabbis, writers and Fran Dreschers.

Everyone is doing every job. “At one point,” Bergen said, “I found myself writing a letter to Oprah to see if she could participate, and then a minute later I was editing a video of a drag queen saying, ‘Yas, Passover!’ so it runs the gamut. If we pull it off — and that’s an if — it will be a miracle.”

The first week of April, the creators met in a Zoom writers room for about 18 hours a day, piecing together a program that would have elements of awards shows, television variety specials and Broadway revues. This week, they worked directly with the talent, watching them rehearse and film the various elements while providing tech support to some people whose many gifts don’t include knowing how to upload files to the cloud.

Most every recording session brought one technical glitch or another. The actor and singer Josh Groban was relying on his iPad both to communicate with the producers on Zoom and to listen to the instrumental version of the track he was singing to. He needed to quit the Zoom app to make his recording.